Find Out What’s Taking up Space on Your Windows PC With Wiztree
Windows: Most computer geeks know about WinDirStat , an incredibly useful utility that shows you which folders and files are taking up so much space on your disk. This is a must-have application because you’ll be surprised – heck, I was surprised – how many times you can find some random triple-sleep folder on your desktop that takes up an obscene amount of space.
Problem? WinDirStat takes a while to work. On my main 500GB SSD, which currently has about 252GB of free space (just my Windows OS and my apps), WinDirStat took 42 seconds to complete the analysis. While it’s less time consuming than advertising Blue Apron on your favorite podcast, it’s still not very fast.
I recently saw some talk about a Wiztree application that basically scans your drives like WinDirStat. I downloaded the portable version and pulled it out, choosing the same disk for analysis as before. It took Wiztree just 1.44 seconds to achieve the same results as WinDirStat, a mere 96.6 percent drop.
How does Vistri sorcery work? As the app describes:
“When scanning hard drives formatted in NTFS (most modern hard drives use this format), WizTree reads the master file table (MFT) of the hard drive directly from the drive. MFT is a special hidden file used by the NTFS file system to keep track of all files and folders on the hard drive. This way of scanning files allows you to completely bypass the operating system (Windows) and significantly improve performance. “
While the two applications differed in specifics — how many exact files of a particular type they found, or what percentage a particular folder occupied — I’ll chalk it up to each, counting (or ignoring) the different file types. Both rated my largest folders and files correctly, which makes a difference anyway. You won’t care much about this folder that has 50MB of random stuff in it, but you will care a lot about identifying the folder that has multiple 4K movies that you’ve accidentally dubbed. If one program differs from another by several MB, that’s okay. Life goes on.
I also love the way Wiztree uses tabs to organize its more general tree view – to understand which folders are taking up too much space when searching – and its file view, which makes it incredibly easy to see what huge files you might need. delete. Right-click any file to bring up the normal Windows context menu, which can then be used to load an instance of File Explorer to the exact location of the file. Delete at your own discretion.
Do you have a Windows app (paid or free) that you really like? Tell us about it: [email protected] .