This Windows tool shows exactly what’s taking up your s…

Stop hunting for large files that hard way.

In the past, I cleared the clutter on my Windows computer without installing anything. I found it quite effective, with built-in tools like Storage Sense and File Explorer helping me locate the space-hogging culprits. But when it came to doing the same for one of my old computers, I wanted to make the process a little easier for myself. Instead of manually hunting for the files using several tools, I decided to use one that would show me everything.

Enter WizTree — a disk analyzer that shows everything on your computer's drives. It's free to use, and it showed me all the unnecessary files and folders stored on my computer that I even know were occupying gigabytes of storage. I was so impressed with WizTree that I even installed it on my main computer and liberated some extra GBs. WizTree uses the NTFS Master File Table to scan your drive at incredible speed, revealing your largest files instantly.

It is the ideal tool for anyone who needs accurate, real-time insight into disk usage on Windows. The computer I was cleaning was a five-year-old family laptop with a 512GB SATA solid state drive (SSD), an Intel i7 (10th Gen) processor, and 8GB of RAM. Of that 512GB, only 22GB remained free, putting the drive well into the red. The first thing I tested was the claim that WizTree is one of the fastest disk analyzers around.

The website claims it's "46x faster than WinDirStat," but since I didn't want to install another program, I tested it against Storage Sense, which performs an analysis of the system drive. Sure enough, WizTree outperformed Storage Sense. On this computer, Storage Sense took a few minutes to finish the disk analysis, but WizTree took less than 20 seconds. I would imagine both Storage Sense and WizTree would finish faster on a computer with better specs.

WizTree is speedy because it reads the drive's Master File Table (MFT) on NTFS drives. The MFT is essentially a database that stores information about every file and folder on the drive, including its name, size, path, and timestamp. This saves WizTree the trouble of reading the contents of the drive on a file-by-file basis as Storage Sense does. Next, I had to test how well it could help me clean the almost-full SSD.

As mentioned earlier, WizTree shows you what's eating up your space using a tree view. This is a tab showing the parent-child relation of every file and folder on your system, with the biggest space hog being placed at the top. For example, the Users folder is a child of the local drive. Expanding it in the tree view reveals its subfolders and files, and you can continue drilling down from there. Everything has a parent except the drive itself.

Next to each parent or child in the tree view are columns showing information about it. This includes the percentage of space it occupies within its parent folder, the size, and the number of files, folders, and total items. There was more info available, but this was all I cared about for the express purpose of decluttering the space on the drive. This is better than sorting items by file size in File Explorer.

For one, File Explorer completely ignores folders when sorting by size. When you do the sorting, it places folders at the bottom with the files perfectly sorted above them. Secondly, it doesn't show how big the folders are in the Size column — this part is usually blank. After WizTree loaded, I immediately got to work. Just by using it, I deleted large files by right-clicking them in the tree view and selecting Delete in the menu.

Each deleted item turned red and was crossed out. I was able to free up space on the drive from 22GB to 142GB within 15 minutes using WizTree. I found that the biggest culprits were leftover app files, virtual machine files, and iPhone backups. I wouldn't have found them had WizTree not shone a spotlight on them by placing them at the top of the tree view. Next to the Tree View tab is the File View tab.

Just click it, select a drive, and hit Scan. It will list all the files on the selected drive from largest to smallest and let you know if they have any duplicates. You will also be able to see their file path and how many duplicates they have (Dup Count column). Be sure to tick the Duplicates only checkbox in the top-right corner so you only see the relevant results. You can easily delete a duplicate by right-clicking it within the file view and selecting Delete in the menu.

Before you delete a duplicate, ensure it's unnecessary — for example, a copy created by copying, downloading, or backing up. Some duplicates are intentionally created by Windows, meaning they're required by apps and services to run properly. Leave those untouched. With WizTree, I found disk cleanup to be less of a tedious chore and more of a strategic exercise. The visual hierarchy of my storage helped reveal patterns about where my data usually accumulates.

These insights don't just help free up a few extra gigabytes — they also help you develop better file management habits going forward.

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