Your hard drive’s filling up? There’s no shortage of tools around to help find out why, but the need to crawl through every single folder on your system means they can be a little tedious to use.
Now there’s a much faster alternative, though, in the shape ofWizTree, a free and portable application which can deliver a detailed report on your space hogs in just a second or two.
How? The secret is to avoid all that tedious disk crawling, and instead access your drive’s MFT (Master File Table, the NTFS index of everything your drive contains) directly. This only works on NTFS drives, of course, but delivers a spectacular performance boost, with 460GB of data on one of our test drives being processed in 1.54 seconds.
The reports you then get aren’t quite so impressive, unsurprisingly, but if you’ve ever used another disk space analyzer then you’ll know what to expect.
One tab shows you disk space use by folder, for instance, so you can see how much your Users folder is consuming, then expand it and see which user is the main culprit.
And the other tab displays the “Top 1000 Largest Files”, sorted in order of size, for an immediate view of the leading space hogs.
Still, there’s enough here to get the job done, and WizTree does have several thoughtful smaller touches. So if you spot a file of interest in the list, say, you can right-click and view its properties, open an Explorer window or command prompt there, maybe just delete it immediately.
And, of course, the fact that you get these reports before you barely have time to blink means you’re much more likely to launch the program in the first place. Especially as it’s also portable, and runs on anything from Windows 2000 to Windows 8.
If you’re tired of waiting for the usual disk space analysis, then, as your hard drive grinds away, then WizTree should make a very refreshing change. It’s an excellent free tool, and well worth the download.
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