Track your hard drive usage with WinDirStat

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Track your hard drive usage with WinDirStat

by Brad Linder Jul 18th 2007

See that pretty picture? That's a representation of every single file sitting on a 100GB hard drive. The shiny purple spot on the bottom is the page file, and to its right are thousands of little yellow spots showing 5 years worth of photos.

WinDirStat lets you create art from your hard drive. But that's really a side effect of its primary purpose, which is to provide you with information about your disk use. We first told you about this free application back in 2005. But even though the program hasn't been updated since last year, it runs just fine on Windows Vista.

While Windows Explorer lets you order files in a folder from largest to smallest or vice versa, it's pretty much useless when it comes to figuring out why your hard drive is almost full. Not that you really need a program to tell you that you've been spending too much time on iTunes (or BitTorrent), but WinDirStat can help you track down large files on your PC.

Each chunk of colored lights represents a folder on your computer. Or if you can do without the visuals, you can just focus on the top window that shows you where your largest files are.

[via CyberNotes]

Tags: disk space, DiskSpace, hard drive, HardDrive, storage, windirstate

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Brian McBride said 6:44PM on 7-18-2007

You know, I just downloaded the new SpaceMonger 2.11 and it is improved over the old. Appears to be in active development as well.

DownloadSquad folks, you might want to check it out.

Ryan Wagner said 6:45PM on 7-18-2007

Yeah, this is a great program, the only bad news is that it looks like it is no longer being developed. So enjoy it while you can and cross your fingers that the developer keeps plugin' away at it.

Brian McBride said 9:00PM on 7-18-2007

I sort of like this app, but I still prefer the old SpaceMonger.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceMonger

I like it more than WinDirStat almost exclusivly because of the text lables on the boxes. I find that I can quickly identify what directories and files are large, because they are labeled. WinDirStat makes me think, uh, what is that large red shiny block?

SpaceMonger FTW.

ocellnuri said 9:01PM on 7-18-2007

Excellent. I've been using Disc Inventory X http://www.derlien.com/screenshots/index.html for a long time, and I'm excited to see the same thing out for Windows.

The graphic representation is almost identical, not sure if they are from the same developer or if it's just an issue of imitation. Either way, it works.

leolobato said 10:16AM on 7-19-2007

Actually, Disk Iventory X copied WinDirStat. From Disk Inventory X website:
"The idea to develop this program came to me when a fellow of mine showed me his creation WinDirStat."

http://www.derlien.com/

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