Check Hard Disk Drive Usage Visually with WinDirStat
January 13, 2008 – 5:58 pmSometimes, we take our hard disk drives capacity for granted. When its capacity is nearly full and there is not much space left to store other important documents, only then that we wish that we could keep track of what gobbled up the disk space and clean it up.
Windows Explorer may not be the best way to check a hard disk usage because it is too slow to check directories and files one by one. For a quick way to check hard disk usage in a visually helpful way, do check out WinDirStat.
WinDirStat is what I call a free hard disk usage viewer - it aims to report hard disk usage in a visual treemap and also helps to clean up unnecessary files . A treemap is colored rectangles that represent all the files / directories that resides inside a hard disk. The bigger a rectangle is, the bigger space it uses- as simple as that.
WinDirStat scans…
Download WinDirStat and install it as any normal application. At startup, you can opt to scan the all the hard disk inside your system, a particular hard disk or a single folder.
Once the scanning process had finished, you will get a report as shown in the example picture above. Here is a diagram that reflects the WinDirStat report:
The “Directory List” will show details about your disks, folders or files, based on what you scan. Useful information that you can find here includes files / folders usage percentage, number of files / folders and more. You can also sort the tabs inside this section, which is pretty nifty. The directories and files will be shown in a tree view so you can expand the tree for more information.
The “Extension List” will show you extension of files that are available based on what you scan previously. The higher the extension is in the list, the bigger disk space it occupies. You can click on a particular extension to highlight its position in the Treemap view.
The “Treemap” is the part where WinDirStat shines the most. Displayed here are different colored rectangles that represents files and directories - red may represents .iso files, blue may represents .avi files and so on. You can right click on any rectangle to go to its original location, copy the file path or access the Windows command prompt with the particular path intact.
and helps cleanup hard disk space.
After you highlight a file / directory that you want to clean up from the Treemap view, you can send it to the recycle bin or delete it permanently. This will be a quick process because you can view the whole directory visually and delete it from the same WinDirStat interface. There is also a “User Defined CleanUp” for power users to create an automated disk cleanup schedule.
WinDirStat, IMHO is one of the easiest and fastest way to check out your hard disk usage. Another plus for this freeware is that it lets you clean-up disk waste from the same interface, making the whole process easier. Highly recommended. Do try it today.
Tags: windirstat, hard disk viewer, hard disk analyzer, freeware, windows freeware, free programs
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4 Responses to “Check Hard Disk Drive Usage Visually with WinDirStat”
Looks pretty good. I’m going to have to try this one out too
By Brown Baron on Jan 14, 2008
By Syahid Ali on Jan 14, 2008
Hi do we have a way of creating a report using windirstat
By Harrish on Feb 13, 2008
By Syahid A. on Feb 13, 2008