Running out of disk space? If you are a Windows 10 user, you don’t need to install any additional tool to analyze the disk space of your system since Windows 10 already has a built-in tool you can make use of. You can find it on the Windows 10’s Settings menu.
On the Settings menu of Windows 10, you can find an option called Storage under the System section. Here, you can figure out what kind of files taking more disk space and delete some of them of you want to. Indeed, compared to disk space analyzer tools like WinDirStat, the displayed stats are far less detailed. At least you can see the kind of files consuming more disk space, rather than checking manually via File Explorer.
To access Storage settings on Windows 10, you can go to the Settings menu by clicking the gear icon on the start menu.
On the Settings page, click the System section followed by Storage on the left panel.
The Storage settings will display all drives on your system. Including external drives like portable hard drive or USB flash drive. As you can see, you can see a brief info about the used disk space. In the following example, you can see that 115GB of system disk (out of 183GB) is already in use.
Clicking one of the drives will take you to the more detailed stats regarding the concerned drive. For instance, if you click the drive C (the system drive), you will see the file types and the used space. Take a look at the example below.
As you can see on the screenshot above, app and games are two file types that consume more space on your system disk. If you click the Apps & games heading, you will see all apps you have installed on your system. You can sort the list by size to see which apps or games that consume more space. From here, you can also uninstall a certain app in case you don’t need it anymore.
In addition to Apps & games, there are about 12 other headings you can analyze. Please note that if you click the Pictures, Videos or Documents heading, Windows only calculate the used disk space on the system folder associated with. For instance, if you click the Pictures heading, Windows will only calculate all image files stored on the Pictures folder. Similarly, if you click the Videos heading, Windows will only calculate the all video files on the Videos folder. In other words, Windows doesn’t calculate other image or video files on other folders.
For instance, if you have some image files on the C:\Users\Your Account\work dir folder, Windows won’t include them on the calculation. You can also remove temporary files via the Storage setting option by clicking the Temporary files heading.
Final thoughts
Windows 10 has some built-in tools which you can to optimize the performance of your system. If you want to know what kind of files that consume more space on your system disk, you can open the Settings menu and go to System -> Storage. Through this option, you can analyze the disk space usage on your system without installing any additional tool like WinDirStat.