Installing a single game or large application on the drive could be enough to fill it to the brim, which would result in performance drops all over the board, as hard drives react with performance drops if they are (almost) filled completely with data.

TreeSize Free is a freeware program for Windows that displays the space allocation of a drive or a selected folder. The calculations are fast, and the sizes and folder names are displayed in a tree style listing after the scan.

Each folder is shown with its icon, the space allocation of all files it contains and its name. Folders can be expanded if they have subfolders, to analyse the disk space usage of each subfolder. This does not require a new scan.

At each root level, the files are listed. A right-click opens the standard Windows Explorer menu with options to delete or copy files, a left-click will execute the selected file right away.

treesize free

The header bar at the top holds several options to change the display. It is for instance possible to switch from Megabytes to either Kilobytes or Gigabytes, switch to percentage view, display total number of files per folder instead of sizes, or change the sorting from size to names.

TreeSize Free is a lightweight and fast disk analyzer for Windows. A professional version is available as well, which adds reporting, duplicate file search and statistics to the program, which the free version does not offer.

The free version is fully sufficient for a quick overview of the largest folders of a hard drive. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7. An earlier version is provided for Windows 9x users.

The program displays all connected storage devices, their capacity, free space and occupied space in the beginning and it is up to the user to narrow down the data by using the computer browser in the left pane.

A click on a drive letter will start an in depth disk space analysis of that drive which will display all files and folders from that root level on sorted by their size. It is possible to sort by name, type or date modified instead. A click on a folder will load the contents of that folder and display the data accordingly.

The Windows Explorer context menu is available after a right-click on a file or folder which means it is possible to perform operations like opening or deleting them right in the program’s interface.

The display mode can be switched to display only the files or folders sorted by size again. These two display modes are excellent to identify the largest (or smallest) files or folders on a specific drive or in a folder.

Files are sorted by their size and additional information like the filename, location and their relative size on the hard drive are listed. The folder display mode contains the same information plus information about the number of files and the average file size.

Links to drive cleanup and drive tools are provided for each drive letter in the general display mode. Cleanup will run the drive cleanup tool that is supplied with Windows while Disk Tools will display the disk properties of that disk.