What are the names of the five biggest folders on your computer system? Windows users will have a hard time gathering this information about their hard drives as the operating system comes without an onboard tool to gather those information from connected hard drives. Third party developers have created dozens of tools that provide these information. Some are integrated into Windows Explorer while others are standalone applications that display the disk usage in their interface.
OverDisk is one of these software programs. It generates an interesting looking chart after analysing a hard drives contents. The chart displays the root level, the folders on that level and most of the subfolders with the size on the chart reflecting the percentage of disk usage on the selected hard drive. Additional information are displayed when hovering the mouse over one of the elements of the chart including the name of the folder, the total number of files and folders as well as the size occupied on the hard drive. A click on an element will center the visualization on that folder and build a new chart that display the different folder levels starting with that folder in root. This is an easy and convenient way to browse through the folder structure of the selected hard drive.
Several statistical information are provided in the toolbar menu. Interesting and unusual is the cluster information dialog that displays various cluster sizes and their implication on the used and wasted space on the hard drive.
Another option is to run queries to find the largest files, longest or deepest path names, directories with most file entries or bytes and those with greatest wasted space. OverDisk is an interesting software program to visualize the space utilization of selected hard drives.
Update: The Overdisk website is no longer available. It returns a 404 error. You can download the latest Overdisk program version with a click on this link: Overdisk (75)
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i am a bit confused this because the developer writes” I’ve currently stopped working on it, due to a bug in the libraries of the original developing environment.” also “and (slightly out-of-date) documentation.” and “and the only problem is that it occasionally crashes after several refreshes”. Reading all this and more main quistion to you Martin is do you think that for the moment SpaceSniffer is maybay the better option?
http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/index.html
I think that all of the programs do their job ;)
Wow, that looks like a clone of KDE’s Filelight:
http://www.methylblue.com/filelight/
S. also SequoiaView ( http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview/ ), which has been around since 2002 or longer. It does a good job and has customizable mode.
For a second title scared me into thinking “More SpaceSniffer reviews!?”. Heh, that one is making way fast through tech blogs and it is indeed one of the best treemap visualizations for hard drive I had seen.