There are an absolute wealth of system disk space managers and visualisers out in the software market. However on my quite regular quests to scrounge out every megabyte from my disk like a junkie on crack, WinDirStat is easily my personal recommended choice.
For anybody who is unfamiliar with WinDirStat or indeed other disk space visualisers, the purpose of these types of software is to map out your hard drive and give the user a graphical image of where their space is taken up. This is often an amazing time saver when it comes to freeing up some free space or even occasionally finding something you’d forgotten and left lying around (such as in my case, my BSG series 1-4 collection).
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At first launch, WinDirStat allows you to select one or more drives you’d like it to scan first. It then does it’s business and presents an image similar to the one you see just above. Every folder is arranged in an oblong formation and every subfolder of that becomes arranged within that formation. Every coloured block you see in the display actually represents a single file.
So for example the white segment highlighted above represents how much space “Edwin’s Music” occupies. Similarly if I were to click that middle yellow square at the centre-top of that, it would show me that that block is an episode of The Engadget Show podcast that I’m subscribed to. From there I can decide to delete the block, open up the containing folder etc etc.
All in all, a great piece of software if you’ve got a mass of data and/or multiples hard drives to keep up with (like me and my 2 terabytes of storage over 4 drives). WinDirStat is available only for Windows.
You can find WinDirStat and the download links on their homepage here.
