How to determine hard disk space usage

Posted on June 30, 2008 at 5:31 am

Over a period of time we encounter insufficient disk space issues which might have been caused by poor preventive maintenance, low budget for a higher capacity disk (not all of us could afford a Terabyte of hard disk), or lack of discipline (we like to download everything and keep them forever even we don’t need them for future use!).

One way to free up disk space is by deleting the temporary files using Windows Disk Cleanup. While it could free up temporary files it doesn’t handle the other files. What if the files that you want to clean up are not temporary files? It is hard to find what contributes to a hard disk usage specially if they are buried in several layers of folders.

I accidentally found a freeware WinDirStat while I was researching for treemaps as a substitute for pie charts. The final output of this tool is a treemap breakdown of every file in your hard disk:

To use this freeware you will need to download and install WinDirStat from their website, run it and choose the drive that you want to analyze, in the example below I have chosen my primary drive C:

For my 80GB disk with about 10% free disk space, the analysis run for less than 10 minutes which is not bad.

After the analysis step, the output of my C drive is this:

At first it looks like modern art or an intimidating cryptic message from space, but after a few moments you will realize that each box represents a file and the size of the box is proportional to the size of the file. The bigger the file, the bigger the box. In summary, you are seeing the whole hard disk with every file visually represented according to size.

Each of the colors used represent a file and it is shown as a legend in the upper right corner. In the example below, I clicked the big red box and it shown the file type which is a pst (Outlook data) file:

The upper left part of the window shows the path of the file or folder that you clicked:

The number at the right side shows the relative contribution of the file to the parent folder.

The files within the same folder are displayed together. If you click a folder name all of the boxes inside that folder will be highlighted in white:

This means if I delete the Outlook folder all of this boxes in red will be gone and a huge amount of space in my disk is freed-up. This “coupling” feature of the path to the box on the map is very intuitive and novice users will easily get used to it. You can either delete the box or the file under the path.

After you delete an item it will redraw the map within a few seconds.

By the way, an extra feature is that it lets you delete the files securely by not letting you “undelete” or recover from the recycle bin:

If you choose this Delete (no way to undelete) the deleted files will not occupy the recycle bin thus really freeing up the disk space. Deleting to recycle bin means you only are moving the files to the recycle bin – they will still exist on the hard disk. If you are sure you won’t be needing the file, choose Delete (no way to undelete).

If you like this little introduction to treemaps, checkout other uses of it on Ben Sheridan’s treemap page: www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history

One of my favorite treemap application is a Google news page generator: http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm

Ben Carigtan is a new contributor writer. A Software Engineer with more than 7 years of technical experience, he will be writing articles covering practical advices and tips for computer users.

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Comments

5 Responses to “How to determine hard disk space usage”

abhishek said on : July 1st, 2008 at 6:22 am

Looks great..and elaborated properly….downloaded…thanks for sharing.

Joe said on : July 1st, 2008 at 8:03 am

i use duplicate finder to find and remove duplicate files…

Duplicate Finder have many options to search and remove them easily… You can find the Free Trial Version at : http://www.ashisoft.com

Allan said on : October 11th, 2008 at 10:42 pm

Try Directory Report, http://www.file-utilities.com/

It finds dupes based on the same name, size, CRC and/or comparing byte by byte
and it shows you the total sizes of all your directories

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