See What’s Taking up Space on Your Hard Drive.
The 32GB iPhone costs $ 100 more than its 16GB variant, no difference in specs. Likewise, solid state drives are more expensive than hard drives but offer less storage space. So, if you are one of those whose smartphone has little internal memory or if your computer has a solid state drive installed, then here’s how you can quickly see what is taking up hard drive space and remove them easily.
While popular ways to free up space on your device include uninstalling unused apps, deleting temporary files and empty trash can, and so on, these methods are not practical in the long run. Because uninstalling applications is not for everyone, and these temporary files / caches are usually small, so deleting them doesn’t really matter.
We often download huge TV shows to our devices, but when we finish watching them, we often forget to delete them. Or there may be other large files that we no longer need. So, the best way to reclaim space is to find the files that are taking up the most space on your hard drive and then delete them.
Now, even though every OS allows you to manually delete files, it’s quite difficult to find larger ones. So, we’ll use a third party Disk Visualizer for this. This will give you a visual representation of your hard drive and allow you to delete files from the application.
See what’s taking up space with Disk Visualizer
Windows
Use WinDirStat to free up space on a Windows computer. It’s free, has a portable version, and only weighs a few KB.
Just download the app and launch it. The portable version does not require installation. After launching the application, it will take a few seconds to analyze your hard drive and then show you a group of color-coded rectangles. The larger the rectangle, the more memory it takes up. And color coding helps identify the type of file.
Now, suppose the largest rectangle consists of a .mkv file, then that means the movies are taking up space and if you don’t need it anymore, you can simply delete it from the application.
Mac
To visualize your hard drive on a Mac, I suggest Disk Inventory X. It’s free and works similar to WinDirStat. When you run this application, you have the option to analyze the entire hard drive (it will take a few minutes) or a specific folder, and then it will show you a set of color-coded rectangles.
Find the largest rectangle and see if you can remove it. To give you a better overview, it also shows the file type and location in Finder. To delete a file, simply right-click the rectangle and select the move to trash option.
Male in appearance
Android has a built-in memory analyzer (Android M and above) that tells you how much memory is in use and which files. But still, for a better overview of your drive, try the DiskUsage Android app. Compared to its alternative, this app is very intuitive, you can uninstall in the app, and it’s free, no ads.
Like all other applications, it will provide a visual demonstration of total storage in rectangles proportional to its size on disk. It can be expanded into subfolders. Find a large rectangle that you no longer need, such as for screen recordings, movies, mp3 files, etc. Then click on the three vertical dots in the upper right corner and select Delete.
Alternatively, you can also use link2SD to move apps along with their data to the SD card. However, this requires ROOT.
iOS
I didn’t find the Disk Visualiser app for iOS, but luckily you don’t need it either. Just go to Settings General Usage Storage. Here, you can see the amount of data occupied by each application on the device, sorted by major offenders. Find the best contender, like Video, then edit and delete the show you’ve already watched.
To get a better overview of the file system, you can also use a third party file manager.