Visually Track Hard Drive Space with WinDirStat

Here’s a quick tip for this evening.

If there is one thing that Windows has lacked all of these years it is a way to quickly assess from a macro level which folders are taking up the most space without having to take a “divide and conquer” approach by right clicking each folder, going to “Properties” and looking at the folder size over and over again.

Fear not, there is a great little tool called WinDirStat which was inspired from the Linux tool KDirStat and it’s incredibly simple to use.

First of all, just select the drive or folder you want to analyse.

WinDirStat - Drive and Folder Selection Screen

WinDirStat will then start rummaging through the drive or folder you selected to work out how much space is being used in each as well as building the folder structure.

WinDirStat - Folder Summary Screen (Processing)

Once completed, you can browse the folder structure yourself to weed out the files and folders chewing up your precious space or click on the bitmap underneath to jump straight to one of the suspects.

WinDirStat - Folder Summary Screen (Completed)

As you can see, I have a 9GB hiberfil.sys file taking up space on my C: partition just in case I want to hibernate my computer (which I don’t as I either put it to sleep or turn it off). Since I use a UPS and backup daily I won’t be at risk from data loss in the event of power loss so off the bat I can save 9GB of space.

WinDirStat is free to use and is compatible with Windows 95 and later – download your copy here.