One free disk space analysis program you should check out is Disk Savvy. It's one of my favorites because there are so many customization options and valuable features on every screen of the program. You might think this software is complicated to use, but it's not confusing at all.
Several different locations can be analyzed simultaneously.
Scan internal and external hard drives.
Includes a search tool.
Supports saving detailed reports.
Provides multiple perspectives to see what content is using the most disk space.
Integration with File Explorer in right-click context menu.
Free users have a display limit of 500,000 files.
Some options you see in the program are only available in the paid version.
After using Disk Savvy for a while, I think these are some of the most noteworthy features of the program:
- Supports scanning of directories, network shares, internal and external hard drives, and NAS devices
- Various options can be set before starting the scan, such as scan performance (full speed or slow speed), folders that should be excluded, and multiple rules (for example, only search files larger than 500 MB)
- Displays the MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, or SHA-512 hash signature of one or more files
This review is for Disk Savvy v16.0.24, released on May 15, 2024. If new versions require comments, please let us know.
Convenient features help you customize Disk Savvy:
- Disk Savvy can be configured to perform certain actions after disk analysis. An example is to save the report to a CSV file if any folder contains more than 10 GB of data
- If you find that you want to know more about a folder, just right-click the folder in Disk Savvy to open it in File Explorer; you can also search the folder for file, copy or move the folder to another location, compress the folder, or delete it
- The data scanned by the program can be categorized in a variety of ways so that you can quickly understand what is using all the disk space; this can be done by file extension, file size, creation time, modification time, last access time, creation date, file attributes etc. to complete
Disk Savvy is very easy to use:
- Viewing and exporting the top 100 largest files or folders is easy
- The full report can be saved as HTML, XLSX, TXT, CSV, XML or PDF, and other disk space usage reports can be saved as pie or bar charts.
- Search tool allows you to quickly find data by name, extension, path, properties, size and many other parameters; search results are sorted with files or folders listed at the top and file category options listed below them
- The very bottom of the program shows how many files are contained in the folder you are viewing and how much storage space all files are using
- Any configuration changes you make to Disk Savvy can be backed up so that you can restore them on another computer
I really like Disk Savvy, not only because the program is very easy to read and understand, but also because it provides a lot of detail and different perspectives that are very useful for helping understand which types of files are taking up the most space. harddisk.
All the folders Disk Savvy scans are listed at the top of the program so you can see which folders hold the most and least data, while the bottom contains all the different ways to view the files themselves.
I'd like to expand on the bottom section a bit because it's very helpful. After scanning, Disk Savvy can categorize the files it finds in a number of different ways. For example, if you group them by file extension and find that MP3 is the largest of them all, you'll immediately know that most of the folder's contents are used to store music files.
What I find equally fascinating about the way Disk Savvy displays this information is that you can open any subfolder from the top and immediately see the corresponding information reflected at the bottom. This means you don't have to rescan anything, as long as the folder you want to check exists in the parent directory you originally scanned.
Because of the large amounts of data you process when performing disk analysis, it is valuable to export the information to a file for later filtering or sending to a technical support agent for assistance. Fortunately, almost any screen showing a folder or file can be exported to a file and saved to your computer for easy sharing.
One of my biggest issues with this program is that the free version only shows half a million files per scan. If you reach that limit, your only option to scan the remaining files is to pay for the software.
You can get it from the official website above. It works with Windows 11, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2022 to 2003. Alternatively, check out WinDirStat and TreeSize Free for some other free disk space analyzers I've reviewed.
