Thread: Finding space on your hard drive for large torrent downloads

When I first started discovering torrents, my main problem was clearing enough space on my harddrive for the really large ones. New computers always seem to come with so much space that "wow, I'll never have to worry about what I save b/c I'll never use this much space".



Of course, over time files and programs get larger because our quality expectations go up (think HD movies), and sooner or later we're bumping up against that evil storage ceiling. Only all this time we've been saving whatever files in whatever location without thought to storage conservation.

WinDirStat to the rescue. This is a FREE Windows-based program that made one of those rare changes to my computer life that will be helpful forever.



The UI is straightforward enough, but a quick list of my tips on how to best use it:

1. Let it do it's initial scan. Choose any single drive you're interested in (including external storage drives), or all of them at once.
2. Take a glance at the pretty colored "graph" at the bottom to get a feel for comparative file sizes, but don't spend too much time on it.
3. Instead, just head to the tree view (upper left) section. Make sure it's sorted by size, and just methodically go through what's there. When the directory is too high-level to be sure what specificly is using the space, drill down to get a better view. Maybe it's one huge file in that directory, or maybe it's a combination of 3 medium sized games.
4. Clearly there will be a lot of stuff you want to keep. This method will help you track down all the big space-users, though, and also give you an instant visual clue about exactly how much space is being used.
5. My own rule of thumb, particularly for games (big space hogs) was that if I hadn't played or used the file in 4 months, I'd either delete it completely, or uninstall the program but keep the physical cd somewhere safe, or save an ISO of it to an external hard drive.

Hope this is helpful to some, it certainly made a difference to me =)

Source and other OS versions:
I learned about this free trick from Visualize Your Hard Drive, and on that same page you can find links to Mac and even Linux alternatives. I've used both the Windows and Mac programs. I prefer WinDirStat's UI, but the Mac one is also very useable and just as helpful.

I tell you what I am going to give this a try to find out if it could help me in finding multiple files in my CP, I don't know why but alot of the torrent files sometime copies more than once so maybe this will be helpful anyways thanks for the useful info

Originally Posted by shadowbuild

I tell you what I am going to give this a try to find out if it could help me in finding multiple files in my CP, I don't know why but alot of the torrent files sometime copies more than once so maybe this will be helpful anyways thanks for the useful info

I used to have a very similar problem when I allowed itunes to (try to) manage my movie collection. It would double or sometimes even triple the files it touched to various places on my harddrive. Thanks for suggesting that other use for this. Makes me wish I'd had it back then when I was tracking down all those itunes nightmares :)

Another great program that has a similar function (among many other useful features) is TuneUp Utilities TuneUp Utilities 2010. Its disk space explorer feature allows you to scan any or all of your storage space or just any folder(s) you select. Once it finishes its scan it gives you a bunch of different organizational views and graphs/charts so you can see whats taking up all your space by drive, file size, file type, date, it even gives you a listing of the top 100 files in the areas you scanned. Its real simple and user friendly. Unfortunately it is a paid program ($50) but there is a 15 day free trial and there are also tons of other functions that make it worth it. Especially if one somehow managed to get it for free

Yeah there is so many application that cleans your hdd

--as Kingofnerds suggested "Tuneup Utillites"

--"ccleaner" is also an good option also he is freeware so no need to worry about money.

--"iolo Technologies system mechanic" i also an better option for cleaning n optimization purpose these r most efficent one..but this is shareware software they gives trial version n after that you have to buy that software..

so dude choice is your but all of them doing same Working cleaning oyur file..

i would recommend you Tuneup Utillities it Works awesomely...

This is probably the lamest comment there would be on this thread but the best workaround for this is to get a new 1-2 TB HD to support your torrent needs. No matter how much space you manage to clear with tools, it is eventually gonna need to be backed up. Defrag keeps the HDD in a better health.

In my opinion, all these disk cleaners (tuneup, ccleaner etc) aren't really necessary. The "crap" they clean is like 1 candy wrapper on the street compared to everything at the landfill (assuming you have a drive on at least a few hundred gigabytes).
When my 6TB are gone I usually go through everything and delete what I've seen / removed from tracker / overseeded etc. Sometimes I watch a 1080p movie and forget to delete the unrared movie, a lot of wasted space there too..
If you really don't want to care about defragging your HD, buy 2 or more indentical drives and set them up in RAID 0.

My 10 cents.