Best Free Disk Space Analyzer

toggle-button

Last updated by v.laurie on 25. November 2020 - 11:58

Introduction

One way to find out which files are hogging disk space when your hard drive fills up is to use a specialist utility that displays your disk space usage. There are a number of excellent free utilities that differ mainly in the way the disk space usage is portrayed.

These disk space analysers are basically a graphical representation of the windows explorer tree which includes all folders and files. There are headings above groups of boxes (or shapes), these headings represent folders, while the boxes (or shapes) represent files in these folders. Usually the visual size seems to be directly proportional to the size of the file it represents: allowing people to quickly identify large files that could be wasting space and hurting performance.

 

Rated Products

SpaceSniffer  

An excellent portable free tool to analyze disk space

Our Rating: 
4.5
License: Free
Treemapping technology, filters enabled, changeable color configuration. Standalone program with no install. Manuals included.
No scroll zoom or stats tab.
Read full review...

WinDirStat  

An outstanding disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool

Our Rating: 
4
License: Free (Open source)
Tree view and other visual presentations.
Rectangular treemaps not squarified.
Read full review...

Folder Size  

Analyze and check the distribution of your disk space

Our Rating: 
4
License: Free
Highly versatile with comprehensive reports and pie chart mapping.
Nothing major
Read full review...

Glary Utilities  

A very useful set of system tools and utilities besides disk analysis

Our Rating: 
4
License: Free (Limited features)
Lots of other goodies in this package.
Not specifically designed for disk analysis.
Read full review...

RidNacs  

A fast disk usage analyzer scanning local and network drives or single directories

Our Rating: 
4
License: Free
Fast and can easily drill down.
Website is mostly in German.
Read full review...

Scanner  

A basic, quick, no-frills drive space analysis program

Our Rating: 
4
License: Free
Lovely visuals. Standalone program with no install.
User interface doesn't follow usual Windows functional style.
Read full review...

JDiskReport  

A Java disk space analysis program with an interesting collection of features

Our Rating: 
4
License: Free
Visually attractive, includes very useful display options and will run on just about any computer with Java.
Lack of scanning speed limits it to casual use.
Read full review...

GetFoldersize  

Determine the size of folders and sub-folders on your hard drive

Our Rating: 
3.5
License: Free
Lots of options, quite fast.
No graphical display of space consumed.
Read full review...

Related Products and Links

You might want to check out these articles too:

 

Editor

This software category is in need of an editor. If you would like to give something back to the freeware community by taking it over, check out this page for more details. You can then contact us from that page or by clicking here.

Back to the top of the article

 

Please rate this article: 

Your rating: None
3.093335
Average: 3.1 (75 votes)

Comments

HDGraph:

http://www.hdgraph.com/

You forgot the Linux versions!

KDirStat is the program that WinDirStat was cloned from. And, naturally, you don't have to worry about trojans in that.

Baobab is a Gnome app that comes with some distros, like Mint. It's also called "Disk Usage Analyzer". After searching around Gismo's in vain, I discovered I already had it.

My find of the month re space analysis is definitely Wiztree. It works by reading the MFT and thus will give you results in just a few seconds even on large external drives.

The only downside is that because of the way it works it's only for NTFS formatted volumes. It also has only a list view - no pie charts or coloured graphs here - but man, it is really really quick!

I agree
Very simple useful result screen
Very fast

Rob

Disk Usage Analyzer: Features: * Finds largest files within selected drive or folder * Finds largest folders by folder size, average file size, or number of files * Presents information visually via graphs * Looks and feels like part of Windows * Provides sorting functionality by displayed columns http://www.extensoft.com/?p=free_disk_analyzer