Free Tool to Analyze Disk Usage

With the growing size of information, size of storage device has also increased to a great extent and disk usage analysis has become necessity. Now talking of kilobyte’s & megabytes has passed and a new era of terabyte and petabyte has begun. Now even our hard disk of desktop/Laptop comes in terabytes to facilitate more storage. Today we also have cloud storage options like Google drive, Dropbox, JustCloud etc. to store our data on cloud but data storage on hard disk is traditional and is always preferred.

Even with more capacity hard disks, we always find it less when it comes to storage of our data. As a human tendency we try to keep all software, movies, documents etc. until our drive gets full. In such situation, sometimes we are not able to find out which folder and files is taking maximum space, if we have a large hard disk with a number of folders and files and thus disk usage analysis is must.

To solve this problem and make easier for us to find files and folders taking maximum space, we have number of disks analyzing software’s which are available free of cost and widely used. Out of a number of tools their are 2 tools which are widely used and are best for disk analysis and scanning.

1. WinDirStat: This is one of the most loved tool to analyze the disk usage and search for maximum size consuming files and folders. This tool is very handy and consumes very less disk space and RAM.

You can select which drive to scan at the start of the program or can even select a particular folder in the disk drive. Depending upon the size of the disk, WinDirStat takes its time to analyze the disk. If the size of drive is large then it would take more time to scan the drive for large files or vice-versa.

After the scanning is complete all the folders and files are organized in tree format from file/folder taking maximum space at the top and less space consuming files are bottom as shown in the picture.

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WinDirStat tool also shows each file with different color which is organized in a form of a rectangle. And if you are looking for similar disk analyzing tool for MAC operating system or Linux, you can try Inventory X or KDirStat software’s.

2. TreeSize: This is another great tool to scan your hard disk or disk drive for large files and folders. TreeSize is also small in size and eat less RAM and thus is a very fast tool. This is simple to understand tool and is similar to WinDirStat and generate output in tree form which can be expanded.

You can directly browse any folder and files using this tool after scanning and directly delete any data from their location. You can too see properties of folder from here. This tool is widely used for system administration task. TreeSize has also professional version which gives more option to its users.

These above tools are largely used for personal purpose and also for the system administrator task to solve C, D drive issues. These tools are often also called as a disk cleanup tool by the help of which you can easily determine which file is consuming maximum space on your disk. Hope you have found this tool helpful for yourself and now you can easily identify files/folder consuming maximum space on your desktop or laptops. If you have any concern about these tools, feel free to ask through your comments and emails.