Hard Disk Analyzer
Sharyl Kimbro
If you just need to see the amount of used/free space on a hard drive, you can use your operating system's built-in tools. Learn how to check free hard drive space in Windows, or how to check your storage on a Mac to do that.
WizTree makes it very easy to locate and remove "Space hogs" from your hard drive. The visual tree map displays the sizes of all of your files visually, helping you to quickly locate large files and folders.
When your hard drive starts to fill up, you don't have to dig through File Explorer to see what's using space. You can use a disk space analyzer to scan your drive (or just a single folder) and see exactly which folders and files are using space. You can then make an informed decision about what to remove and quickly free up space.
These tools are different from disk cleaning applications, which automatically remove temporary and cache files. An analyzer will just scan your drive and give you a better view of what's using space, so you can clear up disk space.
WinDirStat is our preferred tool, and it's probably all you'll need. Its interface allows you to see exactly what's using space on your hard drive at a glance. When you launch WinDirStat, you can tell it to scan all local drives, a single drive like your C: drive, or a specific folder on your computer.
While there are paid TreeSize Personal and TreeSize Professional applications, these just add bonus features like the ability to search for duplicate files, which other tools do just fine. You can scan and visualize your disk space using the free version of TreeSize with no problem.
Nick Lewis is a staff writer for How-To Geek. He has been using computers for 20 years --- tinkering with everything from the UI to the Windows registry to device firmware. Before How-To Geek, he used Python and C++ as a freelance programmer. In college, Nick made extensive use of Fortran while pursuing a physics degree.
Nick's love of tinkering with computers extends beyond work. He has been running video game servers from home for more than 10 years using Windows, Ubuntu, or Raspberry Pi OS. He also uses Proxmox to self-host a variety of services, including a Jellyfin Media Server, an Airsonic music server, a handful of game servers, NextCloud, and two Windows virtual machines.
He enjoys DIY projects, especially if they involve technology. He regularly repairs and repurposes old computers and hardware for whatever new project is at hand. He has designed crossovers for homemade speakers all the way from the basic design to the PCB.
Nick enjoys the outdoors. When he isn't working on a computer or DIY project, he is most likely to be found camping, backpacking, or canoeing.
Hard Disk Sentinel (HDSentinel) is a multi-OS SSD and HDD monitoring and analysis software. Its goal is to find, test, diagnose and repair hard disk drive problems, report and display SSD and HDD health, performance degradations and failures. Hard Disk Sentinel gives complete textual description, tips and displays/reports the most comprehensive information about the hard disks and solid state disks inside the computer and in external enclosures (USB hard disks / e-SATA hard disks). Many different alerts and report options are available to ensure maximum safety of your valuable data.
No need to use separate tools to verify internal hard disks, external hard disks, SSDs, hybrid disk drives (SSHD), disks in RAID arrays and Network Attached Storage (NAS) drives as these are all included in a single software. In addition Hard Disk Sentinel Pro detects and displays status and S.M.A.R.T. information about LTO tape drives and appropriate industrial (micro) SD cards and eMMC devices too. See the How to: monitor Network Attached Storage (NAS) status for information about hard disk monitoring in Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices.
Hard Disk Sentinel monitors hard disk drive / HDD status including health, temperature and all S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) values for all hard disks. Also it measures the disk transfer speed in real time which can be used as a benchmark or to detect possible hard disk failures, performance degradations. How to check hard drive health
HDSentinel is the perfect data protection solution: it can be effectively used to prevent HDD failure and SSD / HDD data loss because it has the most sensitive disk health rating system which is extremely sensitive to disk problems. This way even a small HDD problem can't be missed. The Professional version has scheduled and automatic (on-problem) disk backup options to prevent data loss caused by not only failure but by malware or accidental delete also.
Hard Disk Sentinel runs in the background and verifies SSD / HDD health status by inspecting the SMART status of the disk(s). If an error is found or unexpected behaviour is detected, it warns the user about the current situation and also can perform appropriate actions (for example, start an automatic backup).
Usually, hard disk health status may slowly decline, from day to day. The SMART monitoring technology can predict HDD failure by examining the critical values of the disk drive. Compared to other software, Hard Disk Sentinel detects and reports every disk problem. It is much more sensitive to disk failures and can display better and more detailed information about hard disk expected life and the problems found (if any). This is a more sophisticated way to predict failures than the "traditional" method: checking S.M.A.R.T. attribute thresholds and values only. For more information, please read how hard disk S.M.A.R.T. works and why Hard Disk Sentinel is different. Signs of a hard drive failure
The software displays the current hard disk temperature and logs maximum and average HDD temperatures. This may be used to check the maximum temperature under high hard disk load. For the importance of the hard disk operating temperature, see the Frequently Asked Questions. See the list of Features of Hard Disk Sentinel Professional or our products for hard disk monitoring.
If you are using a computer equipped with at least one hard disk or solid state disk and you want to ensure that your data will be available any time, then the answer is YES. Hard Disk Sentinel is especially designed to you if
DiskCheckup can detect and set the sizes of the Host Protected Area (HPA) and Device Configuration Overlay (DCO). The HPA/DCO are hidden areas of the hard disk that contain data not accessible by the user. These areas can be removed to reveal the data hidden within these areas.
DiskCheckup also displays device information, such as the drive geometry, serial number, model number, media rotation rate, and supported features. The real-time activity of the disk is also displayed and updated periodically.
DiskCheckup can be configured to send e-mail notifications when a SMART attribute has been detected to be less than the allowable threshold value. Such threshold values are determined by the hard disk manufacturer. For a drive to be considered "good", all the SMART attributes must be above these values. Different SMART attributes have different threshold values. For more configuration options, refer to the screen shot below.
A hard drive that supports SMART, plus compatible drivers. Most recent hard drives (SATA/USB/FireWire/PCIe M.2 NVMe) are OK, but drives connected via SCSI or hardware RAID are not supported. Drives configured as software RAID (dynamic disks) via Windows Disk Management will also work.
The SmartDisk DLL SDK and DiskCheckup utilizes statistical analysis to predict possible failure dates of hard disk drives. Because there are no 'certainties' in statistical analysis, PassMark Software Pty Ltd disclaims all liability for any and all costs incurred by either:
1) The hard disk drive failing before the predicted failure date estimated by the application, or
2) The hard disk drive continuing to function beyond the predicted failure date estimated by the application.
In either situation, PassMark disclaims liability for any losses due to loss or damage to data. PassMark further disclaims any liability for costs incurred in anticipation of a disk drive failure that does not eventuate (e.g., replacement hard disk drives, transfer time, downtime, etc).
I just downloaded TreeSize Free and am most impressed with how much you have built into the free version of your software. It is clearly a well engineered and carefully thought out product that will be very useful for finding clutter on my hard drive. It contains far more value than I expected, and I compliment you on a product well done.
Below you will see a treemap of the data shown in bars of varying size based on their actual size on the hard drive. It makes it very easy to see which type of files are taking the most space.
GetFoldersize is a bit similar to TreeSize free version as it also only shows folders and their size on the hard drive. However, it comes with additional tools as well that you may find interesting.
Best of all, it can also scan network drives and list data inside it. One drawback though is that I found GetFoldersize to be very slow as compared to many other tools in this list. And it also has fixed view in GBs, MBs or KBs, so it a little hard to track exact size of too big or too small files/folders.
Another very simple disk analyzer tool that only shows data in GBs and formats it from large to small files. It is incredibly fast as well (3 seconds in my case) and goes a little further by showing total items, percentage size, total files and folders, and last modified date.
TweakNow Diskanalyzer has two main sections, General and Summary. The General section simply lists all the data along with file/folder size. However, the Summary is where you can do all the management.
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