How to see what’s taking up space on a hard drive on Windows 10

• To see what’s taking up space on Windows 10, open Settings > Storage, click “Show more categories,” and review the storage usage.
• You can also use the WinDirStat app, which scans your computer and shows exactly what files are taking up the most space.

UPDATED 10/29/2024: On Windows 10, when your computer’s hard drive begins to fill up, the system offers built-in tools to help you analyze and manage storage from the Settings app. However, for deeper insights, you may need a third-party app like WinDirStat (Windows Directory Statistics) to see which files and folders occupy the most space.

Why does storage analysis matter?

Understanding storage usage can be crucial for various reasons. For example, Windows performance can suffer when your storage drive, especially the system drive, starts to fill up above 60 percent. Also, Windows 10 relies on having some free disk space to perform background tasks, create temporary files, and install updates. If the computer doesn’t have adequate storage, you may encounter error messages, update failures, or even system crashes.

By knowing your computer’s file sizes and storage distribution, you can make informed decisions about what to keep, delete, or offload to external storage or cloud solutions. This is particularly useful for managing larger files, such as video or high-resolution image files, which can take up significant space.

Windows 10 provides tools like Storage Sense and Disk Cleanup, which automatically clear temporary files, Recycle Bin content and other unnecessary files. However, knowing the size of personal files, installed apps, and other storage-heavy content allows you to manually delete or move large files, which can be more effective for reclaiming space.

Storage settings vs. WinDirStat?

The “Storage” settings page is part of the storage management experience and is designed to help you manage computer drive space usage. It’s also a tool for analyzing the content of any drive to figure out space utilization and determine where to start cleaning up files you cannot remove using this feature. However, it has some limitations as you cannot determine the exact files taking the most space, and this is when WinDirStat (Windows Directory Statistics) comes in handy.

WinDirStat is a free hard drive usage statistic viewer that lets you see exactly what files and folders take up the most space on your computer. It does this by scanning the entire drive and generating an easy-to-visualized report with the size and location of each file and folder. This information is helpful for cleaning up space on Windows 10.

In this guide, I will show you the steps to use the Storage settings and WinDirStat to understand how storage is utilized on Windows 10.

Warning: This guide recommends third-party software, and even though it’s a nondestructive application and usually works as expected, you have to use it at your own risk. You have been warned.

Find out what files are taking up space on Windows 10 from Settings

To see the files taking up space on the hard drive on Windows 10, use these steps:

1. Open Settings on Windows 10.

2. Click on System.

3. Click on Storage.

4. Under the “(C:)” section, you will see what’s taking up space on the main hard drive.

5. Click the “Show more categories” option for a detailed list by file type, including system files, apps, games, and OneDrive files.

   

6. (Optional) Click the “View storage usage on other drives” option under the “More storage settings” section.

   

7. Select the drive to see its storage usage if you have multiple hard drives.

   

8. See storage usage for the other drive.

   

Once you complete the steps, you will understand what files take up most of the space on your device.

Storage usage offers an overview of everything stored on the drive, including system files, apps, games, temporary files, and those stored in Documents, OneDrive, Pictures, Music, Videos, and files from other accounts if you share the device with other users. However, this overview helps pinpoint large folders but doesn’t identify specific large files. For that, you’ll need a more powerful tool like “WinDirStat.”

Find out what files are taking up space on Windows 10 from WinDirStat

To understand what’s taking up space on Windows 10, you first need to download and install WinDirStat and then run the tool.

Install WinDirStat on Windows 10

To install WinDirStat with the winget command on Windows 10, use these steps:

1. Open Start.

2. Search for Command Prompt, right-click the top result, and select the Run as administrator option.

3. Type the following command to install the WinDirStat app and press Enter:

   winget install WinDirStat.WinDirStat

   

Once you complete the steps, you can use the app to scan the entire drive and get a report of the current hard drive usage.

Check files taking up space with WinDirStat

To use WinDirStat to determine what files and folders are taking up space on Windows 10, use these steps:

1. Open Start.

2. Search for WinDirStat and click the top result to open the app.

3. Select the Individual Drives option.

4. Select the drive you want to see what files are taking up space.

   

   Quick tip: Although you can scan all the drives, scanning one drive at a time is recommended to minimize resource impact and speed up the process.

5. Click the OK button.

   Quick note: If the device is running low in space, making the experience very slow, you’ll notice that the app will freeze, showing the “Not responding” message, but eventually, it’ll complete successfully.

After you complete the steps, WinDirStat will scan the drive, showing you a graphical report to understand what files are taking up the most space on the hard drive.

The report is divided into three main sections. The tool shows the file structure by size on the top-left side, making it easy to identify which folders occupy the most space.

The tool shows space usage by file type at the top right, so you can quickly see if certain file extensions (like videos or images) take up more storage.

Also, at the bottom, you’ll find a graphical view known as a treemap, which represents each file as a rectangle—the bigger the rectangle, the bigger the file on Windows 10. The color of each rectangle represents the file type, as shown in the extension list.

You can quickly select a rectangle to find the file name and location.

If the file using a lot of space is one of your files, you can use File Explorer to find and delete it. Also, you can right-click the file within WinDirStat to access options to copy the file’s path or open the folder location with File Explorer or Command Prompt, and you will even get two options to delete the file.

However, those large files on your device are sometimes system files. Typically, you can’t just click the delete button to remove them. If it turns out that it’s a system file, then make a note of the file’s name and research online how to remove it or reduce its size.

For instance, if you’re indexing the Outlook PST file, Windows 10 will try to index every email. If you don’t reduce the number of emails the client downloads on your device, you could end up with a huge “Windows.edb” file taking up all the drive space. If this is the case, the proper way to reclaim the space is to rebuild the index database and not delete the file.

Also, if you come across the “hiberfil.sys” file, this is the hibernation file that indicates that the feature is currently enabled. If this is the case, you can use these instructions to disable hibernation.

Always double-check before deleting files in critical system folders.

In addition to WinDirStat, alternative tools to consider include TreeSize Free, which offers detailed file and folder size analysis and an intuitive UI, and WizTree, a simple file manager that offers extremely fast scans.

Did this guide help you determine how the space is utilized on Windows 10? Let us know in the comments, or check out our other guides for more storage management tips. If you still have questions, leave them below, and I’ll try to get back to you.

Update October 29, 2024: This guide has been updated to ensure accuracy and add the WinDirStat tool instructions.