Coding Horror: Disk Space

January 23, 2005

Disk Space

Hard disk space, like CPU speed, isn't increasing as fast as it used to:

hard disk size over time

Still, 400gb drives can be had, and it's not difficult to build a terabyte array if you need to. Which begs the question-- where does all that hard drive space go?

Two tools I use to demystify the "gee, I had 50gb free yesterday" conundrum are overdisk

overdisk screenshot

... and treesize.

treesize screenshot

Stuart Dootson also pointed out spacemonger, another graphical representation:

spacemonger screenshot

I like the Tufte-esque visual style of overdisk, but I'm not convinced the information is any more useful when presented in that format. I run Treesize on servers, too, and I'd like to find a command-line equivalent of Treesize if anyone knows of one.

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Comments

I like SpaceMonger (http://www.werkema.com/software/spacemonger.html) - the graphical representation is (IMO) of use!

Staurt Dootson on January 24, 2005 3:56 AM

For command line disk usage, I use du.exe from http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/. Combined with sort.exe from the same place (I rename sort.exe gsort.exe to avoid conflicts), I can:

()> du --kilobytes --all --total | gsort --general-numeric-sort --reverse
1231198 total
1231198 .
481482 ./dllcache
52494 ./config
42240 ./config/software
36941 ./mui
33693 ./wbem
22598 ./drivers
20596 ./IME
20317 ./spool
20291 ./spool/drivers
19687 ./spool/drivers/w32x86

...

(I bet this will look pretty ugly in your comments section...sorry!)
(Correction: Preview shows that it looks just fine. Yay!)

Chris Bilson on January 24, 2005 8:21 AM

My vote is for SequoiaView (http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/), which has a cleaner interface than SpaceMonger. It also has a nice feature that allows you to colour code the files based on their extension, so you can see quickly see how much space is being taken up by various file types.

Brant LeClercq on January 24, 2005 1:07 PM

You might try diruse, which apparently is a Windows version of Unix's du:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/reskit/tools/existing/diruse-o.asp

Adam DuVander on January 24, 2005 3:22 PM

If you like the du Unix command, then you get a port from the SourceForge project, UnxUtils:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils/

Heaps of other useful GNU Unix tools are included in this collection.

Praj Basnet on October 14, 2007 5:46 PM

I like JDiskReport, available at:

http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/index.html

Jake Roberts on May 21, 2009 4:28 PM