Wednesday, December 29, 2010

WinDirStat–Nice Disk Space Usage Visualizer

Hard disks are cheap and greatly ease the past pain of having to manage free space, but that’s not the case for me: I have a small-ish Crucial C300 128GB Solid State Drive as my C: volume in my work laptop. It’s been absolutely awesome for working with the various VMWare virtual servers I deal with on a daily basis. The speed on the SSD goes to 11.

The only downside is I have to be very careful about free space on the SSD. SSDs need breathing room to deal with various low-level things (go read Wikipedia’s article on them for a great overview), so I try to keep things fairly tidy and clean up unneeded files regularly.

One of the best tools I’ve found to help me with this is WinDirStat, a free GPL tool. No installation, just download and throw in a util folder somewhere. Launch it via SlickRun to be really cool.

You get an easy to understand UI with clear indicators where your space pain points are.

Besides, I’m a tool whore and this is yet another great thing for me to play with.

2 comments:

  1. An alternative is space Sniffer. I like the interface better than windirstat.

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  2. Another alternative is Directory Report. It looks just like the MS-Explorer but always shows the folder size. http://www.file-utilities.com

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