Back in the day, the PowerDesk explorer replacement had a great utility I used when I wanted to find obsolete files and folders hogging space. It allowed me to rapidly search and destroy, and free up space so I could load one more set of sample data for the applications I support. This tool did not work on Windows XP and I have missed it ever since.
You would think this would be a common utility built into the operating system. Even so, you would think it would be easy to find a utility out on the various shareware download sites. Not today. I Googled, I looked on Download.com, Tucows, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and found little to nothing.
Last night I tried Disk Space Inspector v3.3 from AdvexSoft LLC and it is not too bad, but it is not perfect and is a little slow. Definitely not as good as Size Manager in PowerDesk. Size Manager was fast and it worked really well. In case you are not familiar with PowerDesk, it is an Explorer replacement and it rocked. Unfortunately it was a casualty of software company mergers and was not really upgraded. A couple of years ago Novatix got the rights from VCom and created ExplorerPlus, but they did not fix Size Manager. I asked and they said it was on the to-do list. My recent check on ExplorerPlus updates reveals Novatix is focusing on other packages and does not even show ExplorerPlus on their main Web site. Bummer.
Now I see VCom has released PowerDesk v6.0. Maybe they have fixed it, but I would be perfectly happy paying $30-$50 for a Disk Size Manager tool which works well. I want a packaged tool designed and tested to do the following:
- Show me a bar graph of with each drive and the space consumed
- Drill down in the graph to subfolders showing me another bar graph with the space consumed for more subfolders and files
- Ability to delete folders and files
- Good performance
- Ability to sort manager by folder name, size consumed, dates
- Not adware or spyware
- Established software (not interested in v1.o)
- Reasonable priced and supported
Anyone know of a good package and willing to share? Please do not point me to Calvin Hsia’s VFP code which calculates drive and folder space. I already know about this and want a program someone already constructed and others have debugged, not the base code for me to write the rest of the tool.
If you don’t mind Pie Charts, I find PC Magazine’s DiskPie Pro quite useful. You can read about it at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1614586,00.asp.
Rick
Hi Rick,
graphical information can be found in “SequoiaView” and “Diskvision”. I tried SequoiaView, but the “Treemap” interface was not my cup of tea. I settled on NTFSRatio, which is not graphical, but can be ordered and shows NTFS compression as well. Ordered numbers feel ok to me. There are other programs in between (JDiskReport, Treesize, GetFoldersize) but after trying the pie-graphical JDiskReport I stayed with the numbers interface of NTFSRatio.