Hard Drive SpaceI imagine most people rarely even think about how much hard drive space they have available on their computer. They just keep downloading music, photos, and software without ever considering it. But there are times when knowing how much space you have used and how much space is remaining can be valuable. For example, when you are creating your backup file. Uh, you do create a regular backup of your data, don't you? Don't get me started! Anyway, it's helpful to know how large your backup file is going to be so that you can be sure that your backup file will fit on your backup media. Or, maybe you want to install a rather large program or game on your computer. It would be wise to know before-hand if you have enough space for it. Make sense? Sure it does. There are actually several different ways to check your hard drive space in Windows. I like pictures and graphics. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So with that in mind, we need to navigate to My Computer, or just Computer if you are using Vista. One way to My Computer is to right-click on the START button and choose "Explore" from the resulting menu. This will open up Windows Explorer. Find My Computer in the left pane of the window and click on it. The contents of My Computer will then display in the right pane of the window. By the way, if you happen to have your VIEW setting set to "Details", you should already see the "Total Size" and "Free Space" shown to the right of Local Disk (C:), which is your hard drive. So if you just need to know the amount of Free Space or, in other words, the amount of space you have available to you, there it is! However, most people don't have their VIEW setting on "Details" since it is not the default setting. The default always seems to be gigantic icons.
My apologies for getting sidetracked. What I wanted to show you requires right-clicking on the Local Disk (C:) icon and then left-clicking on "Properties" from the resulting menu. This will bring up the Local Disk (C:) Properties window shown below. As you can see, there is a nice pie chart graph that shows you how much space has been used, in blue, and how much is available for use, in red, or some kind of purple. You will also notice that you can do a Disk Cleanup from here by clicking the button to the right of the pie-chart, and, if you click on the TOOLS tab, you can check your hard drive for errors, Defragment your drive, and even kick off a Backup! A Backup, what a great idea! Sorry, I can't help it.
Another way to check your hard drive space is to open the "Computer Management Console". As always with Windows there is a couple of different ways to get there. One way, and probably the easiest to remember would be to click on the START button and then right-click on the My Computer icon. From the resulting menu, left-click on "Manage". That will bring you to the Computer Management Console shown below.
Once here, you want to click on "Disk Management" from the left pane, which will open the screen shown below. As you can see, all of the disk drives on your computer are shown including any external drives you may have attached. There is a lot of information here, including the "type" of drive it is, what "File System" is being used, whether or not the status is "Healthy", the capacity, the amount of Free space, and the percentage of free space.
The final method of determining hard drive space is very similar to the Disk Management screen above. Again, from the Computer Management Console screen shown above, but this time we are going to select "Disk Defragmenter" from the left pane menu. This will bring up the Disk Defragmenter Window shown below. As you can see, all available drives are shown, including any attached external drives. The File System, Capacity, and Free Space are all shown along with the Percentage of Free Space. Disk Defragmenter requires at least 15% of free space in order for it to defragment your hard drive. The reason is, it needs a sorting area to hold file fragments temporarily while it places the fragmented files back together.
So that's it. Several different ways to check for hard drive space. Return From Hard Drive Space to Tutorials
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