Hard disk drives might be getting bigger these days, but it’s still quite easy if you’re not careful to fill them up with all kinds of data without thinking about it. This is especially true with SSD’s because of their smaller capacities, every Gigabyte is still expensive and a waste if not used for something useful. Someone who has only small boot drive really needs to be conscious of everything that goes onto their system.
Finding out where all your hard drive space has gone can be a nightmare if you’re trying to do it through Explorer, but there are several third party tools around to help you out. The one I use and have been using for a while is SpaceSniffer. Apart from being incredibly quick at scanning the drive and coming up with the results, it’s the virtualized tree map layout that really lets you quickly spot the areas visually which are taking up the most space.
To give an example; a few months ago I was asked to look at a laptop with Vista that had an 80GB hard drive which was full, 0MB free! Knowing the guy had not filled it up himself, there was obviously a problem there somewhere. After starting SpaceSniffer, it took all of a few seconds for it to display where all the space had gone, the SoftwareDistribution folder. It was 56GB! Turns out Vista was trying and failing to install Service Pack 2 for nearly 18 months. Full hard drive problem solved in no time thanks to SpaceSniffer.
The program itself is portable like a lot of useful utilities are these days, so just download and extract the zip file, then run the SpaceSniffer executable. The first window will simply ask for the drive to scan, select which one and press ‘Start‘. There’s also the option to select a folder to scan and not a whole drive by using the ‘Path‘ button.
As soon as the process starts, the main window will look like it’s going crazy as the contents are being read in, but it shouldn’t take too long before you start to get a picture of how much data is stored in what locations represented by a series of boxes. The bigger the box, the more space it occupy’s on the disk. Light brown boxes are folders and the blue ones are files. You also have the option for the display to show media files, archives and executable / system files in different colours by pressing the ‘Use File Classes Style‘ button on the toolbar (three little boxes icon).
Looking at the screenshot below, you can easily see the biggest space fillers on the scanned partition are the pagefile.sys and the DriverStore folder.
Using the program is pretty easy, click on the chosen folder name to give a bit more detail of what’s inside it, double click it to expand the folders view to the whole window. Right clicking the file or folder will bring up the standard Explorer context menu if you want to copy or delete something. Navigation may seem slightly counter intuitive at first, but after a few minutes, and with the help of the Back, Up and Home buttons, it becomes easy to find your way around. The blue boxes in the toolbar increase or decrease the amount of detail in the display if it’s not to your liking.
A pretty powerful feature is the Filter option because there are quite a few different filters that can be applied; File name mask, folder name mask, file size, file age, file tag, file attributes and file class. Have a good read of the included PDF User Manual for the commands.
There is also a pretty handy ‘Export to file‘ function if you want to have a text file of the contents of the area you have scanned. Options like list type and sorting method are available along with a scripting window for simple customizing of the way the list is laid out.
Overall, the way the program views the contents of the drives might not be to everyone’s liking but, but it’s speed and the ease at which you can quickly identify areas of the disk taking up large amount of space, makes it a big time saver.
SpaceSniffer is compatible with Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7
A useful Tips and Tricks page is available on the website including instructions to add Spacesniffer to the folder context menu.
Find out Where Your Hard Drive Space has Gone with SpaceSniffer is a post from: Raymond.CC Blog
