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by throw2ih020 3 days ago
If you're on Windows, WizTree (https://diskanalyzer.com/) is great for figuring out what's consuming your storage space.

On Linux/macOS you can use `du` from the command line (or ask an AI to make a convenience wrapper for you).

7 comments

On Linux, ncdu is really good in the terminal. Filelight on KDE and Baobab on Gnome are really nice GUIs.
Yes, I always use `du . -h 2>/dev/null | sort -k1hr | head -nN` where that last N is however many directories I want to show. I run this regularly and have for a very long time precisely because of the issue that the post talks about.
I've been using SpaceMonger (220 KB) since... Win95 I think.

https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=150

DaisyDisk is also a great option on Mac.
I've yet to encounter any issues with gdu for linux. Highly reccomended
> 46x faster than windirstat

Thats a pretty bold claim, but is it really that much faster?

I just ran it for the first time... I've run windirstat many times including in the last two weeks and yes, this is very fast. According to its timing it took 3.63 seconds to scan my drive... I'm not sure if it really took almost 3 minutes for windirstat, but it did take a long time, so it's plausible. More importantly, ~ 4 seconds is much easier to wait for.
windirstat currently doesn't take 3min to index 500k+ files on an 8x8tb drive raidz2 that's 90% full. When I stopped using windoratat 3ish years ago it took a few minutes to index the same array.

I think you might he using an old version, or have an issue with your storage.

I'm running it now... it is an old version 1.1.2.80, but it didn't tell me there's an update, and the functionality I need stayed the same, so why would I update?

It took almost 5 minutes and reports almost 2M items, 1.45M files and 465k subdirs...

I don't know that there's anything wrong with my disk, windirstat has always been slow when I ran it on my windows installation. Since it doesn't cheat, it goes slow. I will say, while it was reading, task manager showed a high read rate and a high write rate, and I dunno why, it's Windows (10); not that going through a convoluted filesystem is particularly fast anywhere else.

It is - it ‘cheats’ by reading off the NTFS MFT, similarly to another indispensable piece of Windows software Everything Search, both of which I miss keenly on my underprovisioned work Mac.
I like erdtree or dust instead of du.