When your hard drive starts to fill up, you don’t have to dig through File Explorer to see what’s using space. You can use a disk space analyzer to scan your drive (or just a single folder) and see exactly which folders and files are using space. You can then make an informed decision about what to remove and quickly free up space.

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These tools are different from disk cleaning applications, which automatically remove temporary and cache files. An analyzer will just scan your drive and give you a better view of what’s using space, so you can delete the stuff you don’t need.

WinDirStat Is the Best All-Around Tool

WinDirStat is our preferred tool, and it’s probably all you’ll need. Its interface allows you to see exactly what’s using space on your hard drive at a glance. When you launch WinDirStat, you can tell it to scan all local drives, a single drive like your C: drive, or a specific folder on your computer.

After it finishes scanning, you’ll see three panes. On top, there’s a directory list that shows you the folders using the most space in descending order. On the bottom, there’s a “treemap”
view that shows you a color-coded view of what’s using space. On the right, there’s a file extension list that shows you statistics about which file types are using the most space. It also serves as a legend, explaining the colors that appear in the bottom of the window.

For example, when you click a directory in the directory list, you’ll see the contents of that directory highlighted in the treemap. You can mouse over a square in the treemap to see what file it represents. You can also click a file extension in the list to see exactly where files of that type are located in the treemap view. Right-click a folder in the directory list and you’ll see options to quickly delete that folder or open it in Explorer.

WinDirStat doesn’t offer a portable app on its website, but you can download a portable version of WinDirStat from PortableApps.com if you’d like to take it with you and use it on various PCs without installing it first.

SpaceSniffer Offers the Best Graphical View

Try SpaceSniffer if you’re looking for something different. SpaceSniffer doesn’t have the directory list included in WinDirStat. It’s just a graphical view that displays folders and the files in them by relative size, like the bottom treemap view in WinDirStat’s interface.

However, unlike WinDirStat’s treemap, you can double-click folders in this interface to drill down graphically. So, if you have a bunch of files taking up space in your C:UsersNameVideos directory, you could double-click each directory in turn to drill down and eventually right-click a file or folder to access options like Delete and Open.

In WinDirStat, you can only drill down through the directory list—not graphically through the treemap view. You’d have to start a new scan of a specific folder to get a new graphical view.

WinDirStat seems more practical, but SpaceSniffer does have the best graphical view. If you don’t care about the directory list, SpaceSniffer is the tool for you. It runs as a portable application, too.

TreeSize Free Has a Slick Interface

If you want something simpler than WinDirStat, TreeSize Free is a good alternative. It provides you with the same directory list and treemap interfaces you’ll see in WinDirStat, but it doesn’t have WinDirStat’s file extension list, and its ribbon-style interface is a little more at home on modern versions of Windows than WinDIrStat’s toolbar. TreeSize Free also adds a convenient scan option to Explorer, so you can right-click any folder in File Explorer and Windows Explorer and select “TreeSize Free” to scan its contents.

To view a treemap in TreeSize Free, click View > Show Treemap. As in the other applications here, you can right-click files or folders in the application to delete or open them.

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While there are paid TreeSize Personal and TreeSize Professional applications, these just add bonus features like the ability to search for duplicate files, which other tools do just fine. You can scan and visualize your disk space using the free version of TreeSize with no problem.

This application is also available as a portable application, so you don’t have to install it before running it, if you prefer.

Windows 10’s Storage Usage Tool Is Built In

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Windows 10 has a storage usage tool that may help you in some cases. It’s not a classic disk space analyzer like the above tools, but it does have some similar features.

To access it, head to Settings > System > Storage and click a drive. You’ll see a list of things taking up space on that drive, from apps and games to system files, videos, photos, and music. Click a category and Windows will suggest things you can remove—for example, you’ll see a list of installed applications which you can sort by the space they take.

While this tool isn’t as powerful as the above ones, it can be helpful for quickly understanding disk usage and freeing space in a pinch. There’s a good chance it will become more powerful in future updates to Windows 10, too.

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Users are complaining that Seagate's Momentus XT hybrid drive, which combines solid-state drive (SSD) technology with a traditional hard drive, has a significant defect that causes it to pause frequently, freeze up and beep a lot.

One user said his drive recorded more than 65,000 spin-downs/spin-ups in its first month of use.

Much of the problem involves a Momentus XT feature called Advanced Power Management (APM), which automatically spins down the hard disk to manage power use and increase mechanical life span. The feature also allows the SSD to take over read requests and serve up the most frequently used data. Users on Seagate's online forum say the problem is that the spin-down feature is too aggressive.

The Momentus XT's relatively low price and its promise of high performance have led to a boom in sales. During a recent conference call about its financial performance, Seagate announced that it shipped about 350,000 units since the Momentus XT was released last spring.

Darren Dittrich, CEO of Sell.com Marketplace, said he was impressed with the concept of the Seagate drive -- a product that cut the high cost of SSD by adding a hard drive for higher capacity. But after purchasing four 500GB Momentus XT drives to use in his personal computers, including a MacBook Pro, Dittrich said the product's shine quickly dulled.

He said he noticed an inordinate amount of spin-downs with the drive. After a couple of weeks, he purchased a SMART (self-monitoring, analysis and reporting technology) utility to investigate the drive's performance and found that it clocked in 3,200 spin down/up cycles.

'That can't be good for anything,' he said.

Dittrich said he replaced his MacBook's Momentus XT with another one that he'd purchased and had in production in another computer a month earlier. The SMART software showed that it had spun down and up 65,535 times.

The Momentus XT is a 7200-rpm Serial ATA hard disk drive combined with 4GB of SSD capacity and 32MB of DDR3 cache memory. Among its advanced software features is the ability for the drive to track use trends and take advantage of its high-performance flash memory to serve up the most frequently accessed data, while storing the bulk of data on its hard drive component.

Seagate said it released a firmware upgrade for the Momentus XT, Version SD24, to address its aggressive APM tool. Dittrich said he installed the firmware upgrade and found that it addressed the frequency of spin-downs, but the drive is still slower than the native hard drive that came with the MacBook and he's still suffering from 'odd lagging, and mysterious slowdowns.'

'They are temporary and bearable, but very annoying for me, even more difficult for some folks on the forums (video editors, musicians, etc),' he said. 'I only have experience on the Mac side of the house, but there are plenty of PC users out there as well who are experiencing spin-down/up, drive stalls, and the like.'

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A Seagate spokesman said the company has been addressing 'anomalies reported by customers' in its online forum and directly to company customer service representatives.

'Most of these anomalies have already been resolved by the current SD24 firmware upgrade located on the Seagate support forum or through our technical support team,' the spokesman said. 'The few remaining concerns include beeping sounds, no spin down in power-saving modes and intermittent hangs, most notably on MacBook Pro systems. Seagate remains focused on resolving these issues as well.'

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In Computerworld's benchmark tests, the drive surpassed the industry's highest performing hard disk drives and even beat out some pure SSDs for write performance.

Seagate's first attempt at producing a hybrid drive failed to gain significant sales. The Momentus 5400 PSD, or Power Savings Drive, had a spindle speed of 5,400 rpm and 256MB of NAND flash capacity. Seagate had aimed for power savings rather than performance with that drive, but it found that most consumers and system manufacturers were more interested in improvements in boot-up times and application load times than they were in decreases in their electricity bills or improvements in laptop battery life.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian, or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.