Monitor hard drive space usage

Posted on June 21, 2008 at 5:26 am

Some people may recall that not too terribly long ago, a good deal of what one did on their computer was restricted by their hard drive space. I do not know how many times I would spot check my hard drive space, on my Windows 95 computer, to make certain that I had enough free space from programs, images, and the like.

Fast forward a few years, and the average personal computer’s hard drive is 120 or 160 gigabytes, compared with the meager 6 gigabytes hard drive in the aforementioned Windows 95 computer.

So free space is no longer an issue, right? We would think that this is the case, but system administrators, technicians, and home computers continue to run into situations where there is less free space than they thought. A good deal of people can easily keep abreast of their current free space simply by checking the My Computer panel, then clicking on View, and then Details. Doing so will produce a view similar to this screen shot.

Now we know, at a high level overview, that this computer has approximately 40 gigabytes free, with that total drive size being 74.4 gigabytes. That is all good and well, but you have to wonder what is consuming the other 34.4 GB of space. May I introduce a utility that will not only give a breakout of the used space data, but will colorize it as well.

WinDirStat (http://windirstat.info/) is a simple program, which provides the user with a tree style outline of what is on a hard drive. It also color codes the type of files consuming the most space. The interface is rather straight forward any easy to pick up and use.

When starting WinDirStat, the initial screen asks the user what drive they want scanned. If your Windows computer has one hard drive, default is the C:\ drive, you would select this one and proceed. Granted, if your machine had multiple hard drives, WinDirStat can scan one, two, or all of them at the same time.

Once you click on Ok, WinDirStat begins its calculations. The time is takes to sort out your hard drive(s) depends on the overall speed of your computer, and what other programs you have running at the time. A recommended approach would be to close any other programs that are open, then run WinDirStat, for faster results.

After the scan is completed, the panel on the right side of the screen will show the color coded listing of what files, and types, occupy the most space. To give an idea of the type of file space consumption, ISO files are are typically larger in size, than say JPG (image) files. So this color set could represent a few large ISO files, but probably hundreds, or thousands, of JPG files. It could, however, be the other way around…

This screen shot is a small portion of the tree style view of the left hand panel.

As we can see, the My Documents folder is holding a good chunk of data. As you drill down through the folder lists, from a higher level folder like Documents and Settings, to a lower level folder (My Documents in this case); you get more detail with files and folders.

Further inspection shows an ISO file consuming 3.9 gigabytes of space. Let’s say that we are done using that particular file and want to remove it. We can right-click on the entry, and choose “Delete (no way to undelete!)”. This will bypass throwing the file in the Windows Recycle Bin.

We can navigate the results in the tree view. However, we can also hover the mouse pointer in the multicolor mesh at the bottom of the WinDirStat screen. This jumbled mess matches up with the right hand panel and the color coding.

Difficult to decipher, yes. But you can discern that the large blue square was the ISO file we discussed earlier. This is just another way that WinDirStat displays the interpretation of your hard drive.

When it comes down to it, WinDirStat is a very useful utility for home users and technical types alike. Considering that this tool will show local, as well as networked hard drive statistics, makes it a handy addition to anyone’s set of software programs.