These days, it’s not unusual to get files with a size stretching into gigabytes. Video files like High definition movie rips can easily consume 4 or 5 gigabytes and things like game installs, ISO images or Steam game downloads can eat up large chunks of hard drive space without you even realising it. For example, my Battlefield 3 folder alone is about 16GB and if you have it installed on an SSD, that could end up being quite a sizable percentage of the drive’s space.
That’s why unless you have Terabyte hard drives sitting there ready to be filled, keeping a close eye on which files and folders are taking up what amount of space on your hard drives and SSD’s is quite important. Don’t forget, filling a system drive to near it’s capacity can have detrimental effects on the operating system for things like defragging or SSD garbage collection to name a few.
Previously, I have written about a very nice little tool which I use quite often to quickly display what is filling up your hard drives called SpaceSniffer, and Treesize is a pretty good program too. Another useful tool to do this and give you a bit more user friendly visual detail is JDiskReport. Although I’ve never really had a good look at it, JDiskReport has been around for several years but still gets updated from time to time.
JDiskReport is a rather curious tool because it’s not a standard executable and actually runs using Java. This means you need the Java Runtime Environment version 5 or newer to use it, but it’s a bit like applications needing something like .NET Framework or Visual C++ Runtimes, just about everyone has it anyway. Although the program comes as an installer, I found it much easier to just extract the executable you download with 7zip or similar and then execute the jdiskreport.jar file, which means it’s a standalone portable file as well.
What I quite like about this program is there are several different ways in which you can visually view the information. For instance, the overall size of a folder or drive can be displayed as a number of different looking charts such as a pie chart, a ring chart, a bar chart or a details list.
When you first start the program, the option to select the folder or drive to scan will be presented along with a few previous scan locations and the option to load back in a previously saved scan result. The scan isn’t the quickest, but it’s also not so slow that it becomes annoying.
Once your chosen folder has loaded, navigation can be done by simply using the folder tree or clicking on whatever type of chart you are using on the right.
Apart from the size tab which gives the overall size of the selected location, there are other tabs to break down things into more manageable and visual indications. The “Top 50” tab shows a list view of the 50 largest, least recently modified or most recently modified files.
The “Size Dist” tab offers a breakdown of the size distribution across the selected folder and sub folders. For example, the image below shows the “Program Files (x86)” folder has 1.8GB of files whose size is between 256KB and 1MB. There is a button on the toolbar (which looks like a #) where you can switch from a size display to a number of files display.
There are a couple of other tabs to sort the display by certain types. “Modified” can sort files into a chart of age categories so you can see the general age of the majority of files. And “Types” will sort everything depending on all the file’s extensions. The chart display can be changed via the buttons along the bottom.
If you don’t like the colour of the charts or the look of the interface, there are various settings in “Options” to alter this in addition to a custom context menu command and a custom list of directories that can be excluded from scans.
The good thing about being made in Java is JDiskReport is supported on a number of platforms including Mac OSX, Linux, Solaris and other Java enabled O/S’s as well as obviously Windows.