Analyze and Manage Hard Drive Space with WinDirStat
There are a few utilities built into Vista and XP that allow you to monitor hard drive health, like our previous article on how to generate a full system health report. We've also covered third party tools like DriveSpacio, and today we'll walk through using WinDirStat to visualize hard drive space.
Installation
Installing WinDirStat is as easy at it gets… the one thing to point out is that if running on legacy systems you want to make sure to check ANSI as a core component.
Using WinDirStat
When first launching WinDirStat you get the option to select All or Individual drives, you can even choose to scan a single folder. For this example I will go ahead and scan my local drive.
While scanning you can view the progress. Check out the cool Pac-Man animations! I am such a sucker for geek nostalgia =)
The scan tool a bit under a minute, and you end up with a nice graphical representation of the files on your hard drive.
WinDirStat has three sections the Directory List, Extension List, and the graphically crazy colored Treemap. The colors on the extension list correspond with the location of the type of file on the Treemap.
Use different view options to change the look of the utility or amount of data shown in the Treemap. When you mouse over a certain section on the Treemap you can choose to clean that file up, look at its properties, or open the directory it is in via Windows Explorer.
Of course there are customizable settings, here is an example of changing the Treemap color patterns.
Conclusion
The Treemap provides the ability to easily go to each directory or individual file on a hard drive. It is also a very nice graphical representation of each type of file extension. If you have ever wondered what files are taking up so much space this will neatly show you the culprit and allow them to be cleaned directly from the GUI. WinDirStat will work on all versions of Windows from 95 up to Vista. This is great for legacy systems still operation that need maintenance.
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excellent tool, especially when you're wondering where all your space is going.
Hi,
I wonder if you can help me.I have a 14.6GB C drive with only 1.5gb free space. My 156GB D drive has 138GB free space.I also have an external 298GB G drive with 294GB free space. I've already moved as many files as I feel I safely can to the D drive.Are their any programs I can safely move to free up space on the C drive? I don't know much about computers, just how to use one.Defrag tells me I don't have enough free space to Run it properly.
Thanks
Billy Thomson
This has helped me on many instances but it was really handy when a neighbor of mine asked me to looked into some of this hard disk issues and was wondering where those gigs were. This came very handy.
@William:
You need a program to reallocate your partitions (C and D). Partition Magic has always worked great for me. Acronis also has a similar utility, but I have never used it. There are free products out there that boot from a Linux drive such as PartedMagic, but I do not have experience with them.
Hope this helps…
Barret
I have been a long time linux user and always loved KDirStat to see disk usage. WinDirStat is indeed a clone/port of KDirStat to windows. I thank the author for making such an amazing tool available on windows.
Oh what sweet joy!!
Where have you been all my (computing) life! This fantastic tool does what I've wanted for a long time mostly in the treemap which gives a visual snapshot of my entire computer giving an instant view of how all my files are (dis)organised. Showing sneaky 100MB movie files lurking within the Windows directory at a glance amongst other hidden secrets.
Its very insightful, fun to use and whats more the treemap would probable make a nice bit of unique abstract art if blown up to a good size and displayed on a prominent wall
Cheers Mysticgeek for enlightening me!
Phil
When I need to free up disk space I use JDiskReport. It works with piecharts an it's free.
ehh… good one ))