How to Find Out What's Taking Up Space on Your Hard Drive in Windows

When your hard drive becomes full, your computer runs slowly and takes longer to respond. The first thing you need to do is to see what is taking up space on your hard drive. Then, you can free up disk space to speed up your computer. And this article will show you How to find out what's taking up space on your hard drive and how to get more space quickly.

How to find out what's taking up space on your hard drive

There are two steps you can take to learn how to find out what's taking up space on your hard drive:

Step 1. Show hidden files on hard drive

There are several methods you can use to show hidden files:

Method 1: View hidden files with dir command

• Press the key Windows + X on your keyboard and select Symbol of the system (Administrator) in the menu.
• Write dir F: / a: h / b / s and press Enter to show hidden files in drive F. You need to change the drive letter according to your situation.

• Write exit and press Enter to exit the command prompt.

You can only view hidden files in the Command Prompt window by using the dir command.

Method 2: Show hidden files with attrib command

• Open the symbol of the system as you do in form 1.
• Write attrib -h -r -s /s /d F:\*. * And press Enter to show hidden files on drive F. Replace the drive letter with yours.

• Write exit and press Enter to exit Command Prompt. You can then view the hidden files on the corresponding drive.

Step 2. Scan your hard drive and find what is taking up hard drive space

Here we will use Windows 10 as an example to show you how to find out what is taking up space on your hard drive. This method can also be applied to Windows 8.1/8/7:

• Right click on the Windows icon and select "Settings".
• Click on "System", then click "Storage" on the left side panel.
• In the window Storage, you will get a view of the space usage situations on all partitions of your hard drive, as shown in the following image:

• Then, Click on a nearly full hard disk partitionYou'll be able to see what's taking up the most space on your PC, including which apps and features are taking up storage.

Now that you've learned how to find out what's taking up space on your hard drive, you can manually clean up your hard drive by deleting Temporary files, useless apps, etc.

Click on each partition of the hard drive, find out what's taking up space. Click on each category and delete useless apps, files, etc.

If you don't like deleting files manually, how to completely and automatically free up disk space and make your computer faster? Read on and you'll learn all the practical methods to free up disk space and speed up Windows 10.

7 Effective Ways to Free Up Disk Space in Windows 10/8/7

After learning how to find out what's taking up space on your hard drive, you can follow the approaches provided here to free up space for important files and programs and improve computer performance.

1. Delete junk files / useless large files

If you have learned how to find out what is taking up space on your hard drive and you notice that the disk is occupied by many temporary files or large, useless files, EaseUS CleanGenius is an ideal tool. It is a lightweight and free program to solve many difficult problems, including removing write protection on hard drives. USB, SD, Internal and External Hard Drive in Windows 10/8/7.

It also supports cleaning all hard drive partitions with its system optimization tool by cleaning junk files and large files. Install it on your PC now to quickly free up space on your hard drive and improve computer performance.

• Download and install EaseUS CleanGenius on your Windows computer. From the Start screen, navigate to "Cleaning" and click "Scan" to start cleaning your system and make your PC like new.
• The will start scanning your entire computer to find inactive data files that take up a lot of disk space, including large useless files, junk files, and invalid Windows entries. This process will not take long.
• When the analysis is complete, you can choose unwanted files among the scan results, which are categorized into Spam Cleaner, Registry Cleaner, and Add-on Cleaner. Once you've made your selection, click "Clean up".

You can also choose «Clean up large files» to delete large useless files, which is also helpful to clear up a lot of free space.

2. Run Disk Cleanup to clean up temporary files

Unlike disk defragmentation, which rearranges files, Disk Cleanup works to remove temporary files and other unimportant data on your hard drive and help reclaim your disk space. You can follow this step after you find out how to find out what's taking up space on your hard drive

• Opens This PC, right click on your system drive and select «Properties».
• Click on "Disk Cleanup" tab "General" and the utility will start scanning your drive and calculate how much space it can free up.
• When you're done, choose "Clean system files" in the window to allow the tool to scan your drive again.
• Once the scan is finished, click "To accept" in the new window. Then, you will see a notification asking you: "Are you sure you want to permanently delete these files?". Click on Delete filesSince these operations simply remove unnecessary files on your system, you don't need to worry about losing important files.

3. Uninstall unused Bloatware software

Many PCs come with a bunch of pre-installed programs that you don't want or need, which are oversized and cause your computer to run low on disk space. To free up space on your hard drive and make your Windows 10 run faster, you can uninstall the bloatware.

Right click on the Start menu, select «Control Panel» > «Programs» > click on «Uninstall a program». Select the programs you no longer need and click “Uninstall” at the top of the list.

You can do this once you figure out how to find out what's taking up space on your hard drive.

4. Free up space by storing files on another hard drive or in the cloud

After learning how to find out what is taking up space on your hard drive if you have some large important files that are taking up a lot of space on a hard drive, you can try one of the following tips:

• Tip 1. Add a new drive to your PC, move and store files to the new drive.
• Tip 2. Store files on an external storage device.
• Tip 3. Store files in a cloud account, such as OneDrive.
• Tip 4. Back up large files to an image using a compressed format, which will save you almost half of your disk space.

5. Transfer programs, applications and games to an external hard drive

If after learning how to find out what is taking up space on your hard drive you notice that your internal hard drive in Windows is full of installed programs, applications and games, you can change the installation location of these programs.

You can free up space on your hard drive by moving programs to an external hard drive and make sure that you can run the program on any other computer. How to do that? Use EaseUS PCTrans to perform application migration in a few clicks.

• Connect your external hard drive to your computer. Open EaseUS All PCTrans and select «Application Migration > Start».
• Find and choose the apps (checked as “Yes”) you want to transfer. You can select multiple apps.
• Click on the triangle icon and select your external hard drive as the destination to store the applications.
• Then click "To transfer" to move your programs to an external hard drive.

You may be interested in: 10 Best Programs to Partition a Hard Drive

6. Disable hibernation

When you hibernate your system, it saves the contents of your RAM to your hard drive. This allows you to save the state of your system without any power usage; the next time you start your computer, it will be right back where you left off. Windows saves the contents of your RAM to the file C:\hiberfil.sys. To save hard drive space, you can disable hibernation entirely, which deletes the file.

If you are using this feature and find it useful, please do not disable it. It is your choice.

• Click on Home, open the Control panel and then click "Energy options". On the left side, click on «Switch when the computer sleeps»
• Now click on Change advanced power settings. In the Advanced Power Options window, expand "Lay off". Then expand "Hibernate later" and change the minutes to 0 to turn it off.
• Or you can specify the number of minutes you want to pass before it goes into hibernation. Click «Apply» and «Accept», then close the remaining screens.

7. Upgrade to a larger HDD/SSD

If none of the above options free up enough free space on your hard drive in Windows 10 or Windows 7 once you learn how to find out what's taking up space on your hard drive, the most comprehensive solution is to replace the old hard drive with a new, larger one.

La cloning It is the best way to replace a hard disk drive, because cloning can migrate your old disk to the new one exactly, without data loss, and it is very convenient.

EaseUS Partition Master, an ultimate partition management tool, enables you to clone an entire disk to another even the destination partition is smaller than the source, which means you can clone a larger hard drive to a smaller hard drive.

Download this easy-to-use disk management program to clone hard drive to HDD or SSD with simple guides.

• Select the source disk.
• Right-click the disk you want to copy or clone. Then select "Clone".
• Select the destination disk.
• Choose HDD/SSD desired as your destination and click on "Following" to continue.
• View disk layout and edit partition size of target disk.
• Then click "Continue" when the program warns that it will erase all data on the target disk. (If you have valuable data on the target disk, please back it up in advance.)
• You can select «Automatically adjust disk», «Clone as source» o «Edit disk layout» to customize your disk layout. (Select the latter if you want to leave more space for C drive.)
• Click on "Continue" to start the disk cloning process.

Final words

Now that you've learned How to find out what's taking up space on your hard drive and how you can fix any disk space issues you may have, you're more likely to be able to manage space effectively so your PC runs smoothly.