Do you ever wonder which files or folders are taking up the most space on your hard drive? To know in detail the state of health of the hard disk, we already saw that one of the best programs available is Crystal Disk, which tells us from the power-on hours to the rate of reading errors or the imminent probabilities of failure. But if, simply, and check at Gud Tech Tricks what you need to know is what content is eating up valuable disk space, with these programs that we are going to see today you can get a quick and precise idea.
This is perhaps the best-known and most-used program on Windows (it also has a version for Mac and Linux) to view usage statistics and clean up what you don't need from the disk. WinDirStar reads the entire directory and offers you the results graphically so that you can see the size of each file or subdirectory and the space they occupy compared to the total. Each color corresponds to a file type (for example, JPG images, zips ...) and you can see the directory structure displayed with the folders and subfolders.
The program allows you to analyze the entire disk or certain units. Once you have the result of the analysis, you will have to decide whether or not to delete (or move to another drive) the files/folders that are taking up too much space and you do not need since WinDirStar does not do it automatically.
Another of the oldest disk analyzers is SpaceSniffer. The operation is very similar to that of WinDirStar: it shows you the space occupied in squares of different colors and sizes. You can also select a specific directory to show you what content it contains. One of its main advantages is the ability to analyze in real-time.
You can filter the results by file names, types (for example, JPGs), or sizes, as well as customize the colors of the file classes. If you need more details about a particular folder, you can click on it and the content is displayed. To find out which old files you keep - and which you probably haven't used for a long time - you have to filter the results with that requirement (for example> 3years).
Finally, another free option to analyze the use of the hard disk is TreeSize (it also has a professional version for € 46.95). It has several languages (including Spanish) and can analyze both a particular folder and the entire disk. It displays the results as a tree with subfolders, such as Windows Explorer, and the folders are clearly differentiated by colors and sizes.
Like the others, it allows you to filter the results by file types and, something quite useful, it also works for scanning smartphones, where it is very easy to run out of free space to store photos and videos.