Best Disk Space Analyzer for Windows
If your hard drive starts to fill up, you might be wondering what exactly is taking up all that space. This is where the Disk Space Analyzer comes to the rescue: it scans your disk and shows graphically where all that space is being wasted, giving you an idea of where to start cleaning up.
There are currently many disk space analyzers that you can choose from. Our favorite is WizTree for its looks and incredible speed:
WizTree
Platform: Windows Price: Free download page
Functions
- Scan one of your drives (or just a folder for analysis)
- Scanning is fast, autofocusing especially on solid state drives, but still fast on mechanical hard drives.
- Creates an interactive data map on your disk, color-coded by type
- Provides additional information about specific data when clicking on an item on the map.
- Easily open specific folders in Windows Explorer, open them in command prompt, or copy the path to them
- Remove space-consuming files and folders right from the WizTree interface
- Show basic information about any selected file or folder
- Browse your entire drive in file order to see the largest amounts of free space
- View occupied space by file extension to know which file types are taking up the most space
- Customizable colors to enhance the presentation of your space-consuming files
Where does it trump
It’s hard to know where to start with WizTree. You’ve probably never heard of it (although we’ve already talked about it ) as you’ve probably heard of WinDirStat . We love WinDirStat. WizTree is just as good in terms of functionality and much faster. You don’t even need to install anything to run it; it is completely portable. You can export its results to a .CSV file if you need a historical record of your hard drive or if there is any additional data analysis that you want to do based on the WizTree results. Other than that, this app isn’t much to praise for. It’s a must-have, and you’ll be happy to run it from time to time when it opens some multi-gigabyte file or folder that you forgot (or accidentally copied).
Where it fails
There is little we dislike about WizTree. Graphically interpreting the files on your disk can be confusing and confusing at first, but the program provides many other methods that you can use to interpret the results. The app is free, flawlessly, but it does have an unsightly (and wriggling) Donate button in the top right corner – this shouldn’t be a major criticism, however, since getting paid for your outstanding work is respectable. To be honest, we’re digging around for what we don’t like about WizTree. It just feels so good. Our only small feature request is a way to scan all of your drives at once, rather than one at a time, but most people probably only have one drive in their name (so it doesn’t really matter).
Competition
WinDirStat is a great space analyzer, just as useful as WizTree. Its analysis is slower and there is no official version as a portable application. You will have to install it in order to use it, which seems unnecessary. (You can get a portable version created by others , but it is not the same.) WinDirStat also does not create a nice graphical representation of your disk (s) until a scan is performed; we like to see how this is generated in real time.
SpaceSniffer is another robust alternative to WizTree. However, we hope that the development of the application is still ongoing; the official download list states that the app has not been updated since August 2018. This does not violate the terms of the deal, but it is worth mentioning it. Otherwise, SpaceSniffer takes a little longer to run than WizTree and is much more geared towards displaying a graphical representation of files taking up space on your disk. I haven’t found a way to get a simple text list of parsing it, which might not matter if you’re just hunting for large files to kill. However, I prefer the hybrid approach you find in WizTree or WinDirStat.
TreeSize is another popular option. It has a treemap that is disabled by default; instead, you start with a folder tree with an embedded bar graph, like the top pane in WinDirStat. TreeSize is great, but not as pretty as the other apps we have profiled and not as fast as WizTree. (If you have a ton of subfolders like most people do, her Treemap will be a little tricky to understand visually.)
Of course, you can always try to analyze your drive with Windows Explorer’s simple search filter – it can show you some of the larger files on your drive without any additional software. However, it won’t show you large folders, so if your problem is with large groups of files and not large files, you’ll need one of the above to help you.
This story was originally published in 2012 and has been updated on 1/8/20 with new app recommendations.