The internet has opened the doors to a massive selection of downloads and content. With it, our hard drives can fill to capacity in a short amount of time. Often times when my hard drive is close to reaching its limits, I'm not exactly sure where all the space has gone. Sure, I could go manually folder by folder and check out which files are taking up all the space, but we'd love to save you some time instead. Let's look at two utilities, one for Windows and one for Mac, that can help you find which fat files are filling up your hard drive.

WinDirStat

WinDirStat, short for Windows Directory Statistics (catchy, eh?), is a program that scans a storage volume, individual folder or even a network drive (we wouldn't recommend that) to ascertain which part of the drive is taking up all the space.

When the program starts, simply select a drive or an individual folder, click OK and the program will start running.

Programs like WinDirStat take up huge amounts of resources, so it's a good idea to run them on their own. I was running too many other memory intensive programs, like Firefox with 30 tabs, so I had to restart my computer .

After the report runs, you'll get a tree displaying all the individual files color coded according to type. In our case, those big blue files are package files, which are resources for a game I have installed.

Either select individual files to see their location, select folders in the upper left to see which files are contained within, or you can select files by filetype in the upper right pane. Then, decide whether to keep the files or trash them.

Disk Inventory X

Disk Inventory X takes a virtually identical approach to revealing the culprit of disk space woes. The software works in an extremely similar manner to its Windows counterpart. Start by scanning a specific drive or folder.

The program will then generate a report that looks similar to WinDirStat's report, showing exactly which files are taking up the most space, which directories are the largest, and which types of files are pooling together to take up the most space.

From there, it's just a few clicks to figure out which folder, file or file type is giving you grief. All-in-all, the process is pretty simple for both platforms, and the best part is that it's free. Download the software at either the Disk Inventory X page, or the WinDirStat page. Got some software that you'd like us to spotlight? Hit our tips form and let us know, or leave a comment on this post.