Hard drives with hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of storage can now be purchased by just about anyone. With the low price tag along with the popularity of high definition digital media distribution soaring, it's a good idea to purchase a hard drive big enough to hold all of your digital media. Sometimes though not everyone needs to physically upgrade their old hard drives. We can improvise by deleting unwanted files in hopes to make room for newer media files. The problem lies in finding those files to delete. With a little help from a free utility however, can make the job that much more easier.
As we use our computer hard drives over a long period of time, we start to lose track at what we've downloaded or kept on the hard drive themselves. For users with large capacity hard drives, they can develop the habit of downloading and storing just about anything they can get their hands on. They'll probably store those files away somewhere in hopes that they might need it again someday but in reality, they will have forgotten all about it the very next day. This creates the problem of having unwanted files stored on your hard drive. Having unwanted files mean precious hard drive space being wasted.
The major problem we face is not being able to easily identify which files take up the most storage space. Depending on how you organize and store your files on the hard drive, every person's hard drive will be different. With the Windows operating system, there really isn't a way to quickly glance at how our hard drive space is being used. We must rely on ourselves to keep track of where we put our large media files. Even with Windows 7, nothing new or much have been done about this issue. But fear not as a simple workaround is all it takes to correct that problem.
I always come across many users laptop and PCs and find it awkward at how their hard drive space is always low yet the owner can't tell me why it is so! Basically they have no idea what is actually taking up the majority of their disk space. Just recently a friend asked me if I could help him resolve this very same issue on his laptop. Turns out he recently gave the laptop to his other friend for use and when he got it back, his hard drive space was almost depleted. He didn't know why and it didn't help either that he couldn't contact the guy to ask for an explanation. As usual, I volunteered to save the day. With a simple utility called WinDirStat, I quickly helped him resolve the issue and reclaim back his hard disk space.
WinDirStat
With this simple and free utility, I have the ability to quickly glance at any hard drive I come across to see how that hard drive is used. This is made possible due to how WinDirStat presents me that information. By presenting the hard disk usage in a graphical and colored tree, I can easily see what files are occupying the most disk space. You'll quickly catch on once you see it in action so let's start.
1. You can download WinDirStat from here. There is also a portable version available so grab it if you plan on using this app on-the-go. Note that you do not actually need to have PortableApps installed on your USB thumb drive or computer to use it.
2. Once you have extracted or installed WinDirStat, simply fire it up. You'll quickly be presented with a drive selection box. Select the drive you want to scan on. You also have the option of scanning a folder rather than a whole drive. This is helpful if you have a heavily nested folder with tons of other sub-directories and files inside.
3. As soon as you made your selection, WinDirStat will immediately go to work. Obviously, the larger your hard drive and the more files you have the longer it will take for WinDirStat to categorize everything. Just let the little Pacman's do the work!
4. Once the scan is completed, you'll then be presented with the graphical treemap view. This is where the magic happens. Simply selecting a colored block will have WinDirStat immediately point out which file represents it. The size of the colored block is relative to how big the file size for the file is in relation to your entire hard drive. Therefore, the bigger the block size, the bigger the file is. As you can see, quickly locating large multimedia files is a breeze. You can easily delete the file as well right inside WinDirStat by right clicking on the file in top section and selecting Delete from the menu. Here is a picture of how my hard drive looks:
You'll also notice that you can quickly highlight all files belonging to a certain file extension by simply selecting it in the extension window of WinDirStat. For example, if I wanted to simply see all files with the .WMV extension (movie files) on my hard drive, I would simply select the .WMV extension and the treemap will now display them for me to see. This is a very useful feature!
Don't freak out when you notice all the other smaller colored blocks. Remember, our main goal is to view the files that occupies the most disk space (they are usually video files). Those smaller blocks represents system files, your MP3s or text documents.
5. WindirStat also allow for some configuration if you simply head into the Options menu but from my working with the tool, the default settings are good enough if all you want to do is to weed out those large sized files. However, WinDirStat can perform other tricks as well such as emailing a report to other users and configuring automatic cleanup procedures. Explore these options if you require of them.
As a last note, if you are using WinDirStat on another person's computer, I highly suggest you warn the owner that by helping them remove potentially unwanted files you will be able to see the actual filenames of the files themselves. Sometimes the user might have private files stored on the computer that could embarrass them if you knew about them so always warn them before performing these types of procedures on their hard drive.
Well there you have it folks. A graphical view of your hard drive usage. Hopefully one day this feature will be built-in into Microsoft's operating system because it's a real time saver. Rather than manually searching for files and folders to see if they hold those unwanted files in Windows Explorer, WinDirStat provides a graphical overview instead that lets you instantly drill down to the files occupying the most space on the disk.
