Space saving software for your hard disk

It doesn’t seem to matter how many external hard drives I buy, I fill them up no sooner than I’ve connected them. Most of the time, I don’t even have a clue how full they are either – I just keep adding videos and music until I get that dreaded “Disk Full” message, usually whilst trying to do something in a hurry.

Help is at hand however with a few tools designed to track your hard disk usage and capacity. Try starting with something simple like Abaiko Disk Space Monitor which, as the name suggests, concentrates on monitoring your disk’s capacity. It shows clearly exactly how full your disks are no matter how many you have attached. If you’re working on a much grander scale, such as a network administrator, then you’ll need something a bit more powerful like DiskMonitor which keeps an eye on all PCs and hard drives attached to your network.

Space concerns are only one aspect of disk usage though. If you’re experiencing performance problems on your hard drive then you’d be better to install something that’s more multipurpose. An example is Hard Disk Sentinel which monitors hard disk capacity, but also such things as the temperature and overall “health” of the disk which inevitably declines after years of use. The same goes for Disk Watchman which performs a similar job but does it much more discreetly, is lighter on your CPU and therefore a better choice for slower machines.

Of course, if none of this really helps you keep your hard disk usage under control, you should take a step back and look at what exactly is on your drive with TreeSize and you’ll probably find there’s all sorts of old files taking up valuable space which you can simply delete.