Want to know what is taking up hard drive space on Windows 10? In Microsoft’s latest operating system, there is a disk analyzer tool in Settings to quickly find out the types of files and the disk space they are taking up on your computer. This is useful if you want to manage storage or clear unnecessary files to free up space.
Knowing the status of hard drive storage on your PC can save you the headache of having to remove files on the spot when trying to install something that requires more space than what is currently available on your system. If this scenario, a user often gets wound up fretting over the ways to find out what’s taking up storage space on the hard drive so that they can take steps needed for recovering storage.
This is where Microsoft’s Storage Sense comes into the equation. Not only it provides a quick summary of files size and their storage location on system hard drives, but this tool also offers the convenience of swiftly removing unimportant ones for swift storage recovery on your Windows 10 device.
To free up hard drive space on Windows 10 Home, Pro, Education, and Enterprise editions, Storage Sense performs critical hard disk storage recovery tasks in a few simple steps. Besides being a disk space cleaner feature, it’s a useful analyzer tool to get a snapshot of the content on your drive and see how space is being distributed among files saved on your device. This makes the task of deleting unimportant files to recover storage space easier on Windows 10.
Here is a tutorial on how you can use Storage Sense to see PC storage status in a simple-to-understand interface and use that information to take required steps for disk space recovery on a desktop or laptop.
Find Out What Files Are Taking Up Hard Disk Storage Space On Windows 10 PC
To see how the storage is divided across various hard disk locations on your computer, here are the steps to use Storage Sense:
- Go to Settings.
- Head over to System > Storage.
- Now under “Local Storage,” and select the drive to see its storage usage.
- In “Storage usage” window, you can see all the items taking up space on the hard disk under separate categories. To view details about each item, simply click on it.
For instance, if you’ve noticed that temporary files are taking up too much space (as you can see in the image above that this applies in my case), select that item from the list to get further information about individual files in that particular section. Next, select the files you no longer need and hit “Remove files” button.
After completing the steps, Windows 10 cleans up the drive to make room for new files.
If you want to quickly free up storage space, navigate to Settings > System > Storage and on the right-pane, under “Storage Sense”, click free up space now link.
Storage Sense gives a quick overview of everything installed on your hard drive, including apps, games, files, documents, temporary files, folders, music, videos, pictures, and other system maintenance tools.
