Q: How can I easily check what is using up all the space on my disk drive?

A. I often look at my disk drives and wonder where all the space went. Previously, I would go through the process of selecting the properties of each top-level folder and see what was using the space, then narrow the search.

But there are scripts that can help. For example, a Windows PowerShell script at Microsoft's library  creates a report of folder sizes.

Another great tool to use is SpaceMonger from Sixty-Five, which is shown below. The operation is simple: Just select the drive from the Drives section, then a Treemap is created showing where all the disk space is being consumed.

You can easily see what folders are using up the space and even specific very large files. You can see in Figure 1 below that my rips of my movies take up most of my space:

Figure 1: SpaceMonger

If you select the Statistics tab, it actually gives information on the percentage type of files and number of files of specific sizes as Figure 2 shows below. Note it also shows hidden space details in addition to space that can’t be scanned.

Figure 2: SpaceMonger stats tab