If you don’t know where all of your hard drive space went and are struggling to clear up large files, this terrific FREE program can help.
You may be thinking ‘but I’ve already seen excellent programs like this on this very site’, but WizTree has a special feature to recommend it: it is extremely fast. Your hard drive, no matter how large it may be, will be processed in a manner of seconds. The downside? It supports NTFS drives only.
The reason this program is so fast is that rather than scanning your hard drives it instead obtains information on your files from the hard drive’s Master File Table (MFT) directly, which logs all changes made on an NTFS drive, similar to previously mentioned desktop search program ‘Everything’. The MFT is a feature of NTFS drives and not FAT, which is why this program only works with NTFS formatted drives.
The verdict:
This program has considerable appeal: it’s portable, so you only have to unzip and run it, and it’s extremely fast, so that you get the information that you are looking for almost immediately, without having to wait for a long, drawn out scanning process of your hard drive every single time you want this functionality. It also has a nice, tabbed interface that is simple and straightforward.
I mentioned elsewhere that my favorite program to identify large files and folders is SpaceSnifffer, which employs a very nice visual ‘Treemap’ representation of files and folders, but WizTree is on my hard drive to stay, because it’s hard to argue with speed, especially when your hard drive is completely clogged and you just want to quickly delete something to allow that download to continue. The one thing I would wish for is a Windows context menu extension that lets you right click on any folder and analyze the size of it’s contents (something that is found in Ridnacs, a similar utility, but without the speed that WizTree brings).
Get WizTree here (Windows).
