What’s taking up all my hard drive space?

Receiving messages that your hard drive space is getting low? If you do you machine will start running a lot slower and start throwing a few new errors at you since some programs won’t be able to run.  Sometimes it can be hard to locate the file(s) that are taking up your whole hard drive. Thats where WinDirStat comes in.

WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for various versions of Microsoft Windows.
Note: if you are looking for an alternative for Linux, you are looking for KDirStat (apt-get install kdirstat on Debian-derivatives) and for MacOS X it would be Disk Inventory X or GrandPerspective.

Please visit the WinDirStat blog for more up-to-date information about the program.

On start up, it reads the whole directory tree once and then presents it in three useful views:

• The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,
• The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,
• The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.

The treemap represents each file as a colored rectangle, the area of which is proportional to the file’s size. The rectangles are arranged in such a way, that directories again make up rectangles, which contain all their files and subdirectories. So their area is proportional to the size of the subtrees. The color of a rectangle indicates the type of the file, as shown in the extension list. The cushion shading additionally brings out the directory structure.

WinDirStat | Download