Have you ever wondered what exactly is filling up your hard drive? I mean when you bought your machine you had a 40, 80, 250 or even a half a terabyte and a few months later you are deleting files to make room for your new torrents downloads.
Well we came across a program called OverDisk. OverDisk can analyze your hard drive or just a folder and break down what’s actually taking up your space. Let’s take a look at how OverDisk works.
After downloading and installing the 503kb file I was greeted by this screen.
It looked pretty blank and void of information. It was begging me to run a scan”¦ And that is exactly what I did. I pulled down the Root menu and selected my C:\ drive as you can see below.
OverDisk started doing it’s thing and began scanning my C Drive which is a 40gb IDE drive that the system sees 35 Gigabytes of.
It looked like it was going to take a while”¦
8 minutes into the scan I was not even 50% complete. Did I mention that I have NO PATIENCE whatsoever? Yeah well that might be my OCD”¦ So I went for some coffee.
Luckily this isn’t a live blog! But seriously I came back and my results were still not where I wanted them to be:
I gave up and decided to scan a smaller area for this test. This time I choose my Azerus download folder and let it rip:
This was a folder that contains around 2gb of data so I figured it would be done much quicker”¦ It was almost instant and this is what I saw:
And by hovering over on any part of the graph I can see what it is representing. Check it out:
So by just hovering my mouse over a chunk of data I can see that Website Templates are holding about 20% of my scanned directory. Then I can drill down on the left by clicking on that directory to see what is in it:
That is the main purposes of Overdisk but let’s go through the rest of the menu options as well.
Check out the settings that OverDisk has:
Wow information overload! But, this can be a huge help in cleaning out your hard drive and freeing up space. That is something I SERIOUSLY need to do! Do you use another program similar to this or something that accomplishes the same goal? Well then share em’ with us in the comments!
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there is a program i use called WinDirStat that does the same thing but is way more user friendly
http://download.cnet.com/WinDirStat/3000-2248_4-10614593.html
I usually use windirstat, but this looks interesting. I will have to check it out. Thanks again.
“Scanner” from Steffen Gerlach does the same job and has been there a loong loong time ago (I use it at least since 2002). It is not that slow in scanning on WinXP, and it is portable, just 165K in size. So no need to install, no need for a coffee break.
You can find it here: http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/
JDiskReport does it well too : http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/
This looks like a little beauty. I’m commenting so that I can see subsequent comments.
I dont get it. How will the program help me clean up my disk ? (Did I mention I have not already cleaned up my disk because I am lazy ?)
Hey quite a nice utility this is….really worth trying!
WinDirStat is vastly superior based on your experience here. Much faster and provides all the same details. Since trying it I’ve not found anything that’s better at what it’s designed to do.
Spacemonger does this as well.
http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/
Nice. I like it. Check this one out. I think it does a better job especially for a loaded hard drive. http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/index.html
If your using linux, kdirstat is good for this (Basically the same thing as WinDirStat, but for the KDE desktop)
I use SequoiaView to police my drives. Very cool program and comparatively fast although the default settings are dull. If you download it you want to enable color scheme and the squarified cushion treemap in options.
Is there a way to do this within vista and not have to fiddle with any 3rd party software
This one is really friendly and fast : explorerxp.com/