Thanks to WinDirStat (Windows Directory Statistics), you can easily find out the individual files or folders that is consuming a good portion of your disk space as well as quickly delete files.

Usage of WinDirStat is easy and straightforward. When the program first starts, it will ask which drives to scan.

Select which drives to scan

A scan of my C drive which has around 100 GB used up took around 8 minutes and RAM usage continued to rise to a peak 100 MB with CPU usage at around 50%. By default, a Pacman animation is used to indicate that the particular folder or file is being scanned.

Scanning my primary partition (C:)

When the scanning is done, users are presented with a very colorful arrangement of quadrilaterals (known as the “Treemap”, each piece representing a file in the hard drive and folders are represented by a larger quadrilateral consisting of many smaller pieces. Each file type is color coded.

There only seems to be 13 unique colors. It seems like only the 12 most common file types use a color, while the remaining ones use gray.

Files in the hard drive are arranged based on folder and color coded based on file type.

Clicking on a box in the “Treemap” will locate that file on the list above. This process can freeze up the program for a moment especially if the file is located deep within folders.

Clicking on any folder or file in the folder list will locate it in the treemap.

In the folder list, the Subtree Percentage meter shows what percent of the parent folder (1 level up) the individual file or directory is using. It can be configured with different colors for up to 8 levels.

Subtree Percentage uses colored meters to shows how much of a parent folder's space is used up by the particular file or folder.

The “Cleanup” menu as well as the top toolbar and right click context menu for the treemap and folder list provides some useful features including permanently deleting a particular file (skip Recycle Bin), locate file in Windows Explorer, and go to the directory in Command Prompt using the “cd” change directory command.

Cleanup menu lets you delete the file(s), command prompt to the directory, locate in Windows Explorer, and more.

WinDirStat can even send an email to the owner containing a disk space usage report and reminding them to clean up their disk.

An interesting bug I noticed was that it reported the Last Change date for some of my folders as 2049 while Windows Explorer reports them as 2009.

Last Change Date for my Windows.old folder is reported as 2049 although Windows Explorer reports 2009

Please note that at the time of writing, WinDirStat has not been updated for over 2 years. It was last updated on September 2, 2007, however, it still works great on Windows 7.

WinDirStat 1.1.2.80 Rating:

Performance: 3.5
Features: 4
Ease of Use: 5
Value for Money: 5
Appearance: 5

Final Rating: 4.375

Overall, while it is a bit slow at times, WinDirStat is a very useful open source utility for trying to find out what file(s) are eating up your free hard drive space and I recommend it that all users give it a try.

Windows Directory Statistics
Supports all Microsoft Windows versions
Download Size: ~631 KB

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