It seems like every time I get that shiny new desktop or laptop, within a month’s time I’m beginning to wonder where all of that disk space has gone. I’m a little bit of a hoarder and collector, and serial torrent freak, and I’m not shy when it comes to letting my disks fall below 10% available space (which I don’t recommend, by the way).

When I’ve got to go back and right my wrongs, it’s helpful to be able to use something more extensive and useful than Windows’ old default Explorer and Search. They don’t really get the job done for me. I need to see my disk from the top down and figure out which file or folder is being the hog. The tool I’m going to introduce to you today - DiskSavvy, will do just that.

Click here to check out the official DiskSavvy website!

Disk Savvy is a piece of Windows software that will allow you to analyze local and external disks. You can also use Disk Savvy to explore network shares and NAS devices. DiskSavvy Pro is just $10, but they also offer a freeware alternative to the software that really gets the job done.

Initial configuration is run upon first-time launch of the application, and from there running your disk analysis is a breeze. Click the Analyze button across the top menu and you’re able to analyze a directory, entire disk, or other local, external, or network device.

The screenshot above is a quick analysis of my Documents folder. This is what a gamer’s hard drive looks like.

You can see that, by default, the list is organized by disk space in descending order. If I want to save the most disk space in this situation, it looks like I’m getting rid of my LA Noire folder.

Clicking the Charts button across the top menu will allow you to visualize the just-run analysis in many different ways. You’re able to choose what data is being analyzed and in what type of chart. In the above screenshot, we’re looking at disk space usage per directory in a pie chart.

Here, we can see the number of files per extension in a bars chart. I’m a visual person, and this really helps me understand the information that I’m looking at.

The Command menu offers a lot of functionality, like being able to save your analysis or open the analyzed data in Windows Explorer. You can also copy files to a directory, move files, compress and copy, compress and move, and delete files from that menu.

DiskSavvy is very configurable, as you can see under the Tools menu. You’re able to change visual elements of the interface, automatically check for program updates, and play with the way that DiskSavvy actually scans and analyzes your disks.

Features that I haven’t covered, such as Classify, are only available in the paid version of this software.

Let me know what you think of DiskSavvy in the comments. I’ve used a lot of different disk space analysis programs for Windows, and this is one of the better!