diskview makes finding disk space hogs easy

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Feb 21, 2007

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My Outlook .PST file is approximately 4GB, and my archive .PST files are roughly 2GB each. I've upgraded the hard drive in my ThinkPad three times and am currently at a 100GB drive and until this morning, I had only 6GB of free space. Rather than buy another new hard drive, I decided to see how much data I could clean off this drive since I knew that I had gigabytes worth of trialware downloads, temporary video files, digital photos and other data that I no longer need. Unfortunately, quickly & easily finding the files & folders that would free the most space after deleting was my challenge - until I discovered DiskView.

DiskView integrates into the Windows Explorer shell and, after scanning my hard drives, it gave me a graphical view showing how files and folders are using space on my hard drive. At a glance I was able to see that my /Temp, /Documents and Settings and /Windows folders were eating the majority of my drive. The /Windows folder didn't bother me, but I knew that I could free a lot of space by cleaning data out of my personal folders in /Documents and Settings and definitely could dump some of the hundreds of folders inside my /temp directory. DiskView allows drill-down through my file system using its graphic display to quickly locate large folders and files, like this:

In less than five minutes, I found nearly 10GB of files that I could delete, including 2GB of temporary .MPG files that Ulead Video Studio had created when I was converting miniDV video tapes into .MPG and .AVI files. I also found an old copy of one of my .PST files that was just over 1GB. I had about 3GB of various trialware .EXE, .MSI and .ZIP files scattered throughout my drive too.

In addition to the radial view above, DiskView also adds "fuel gauges" to the folders in Windows Explorer so that I can easily see which folders hold large amounts of data every time I browse my folder structure:

If you'd like an easy way to quickly see how your utilizing your disk space, then I recommend DiskView. I used the free trial version and their personal edition is less than $50, so it's a good deal for the time it saves.

P.S. A DiskView plugin is also available for the Google Desktop Search toolbar.