November 19, 2006
Everyone could use a little extra hard disk space. With the proliferation of broadband Internet, it's so easy to run out of room for all those animé episodes and Mozart MP3s. Developers like me have the added burden of supporting multiple IDEs, DBMS's, Web servers, virtual machines, frameworks, SDKs, and all the documentation that goes along with them.
80 gigs just doesn't cut it anymore. 160 will give you a lot more breathing room, but you're bound to hit the wall eventually. Burning DVDs is a great solution, but there's still the question: exactly what is eating up all your precious hard disk space?
SequoiaView is the answer. SequoiaView presents a visual representation of each individual file and directory on your hard disk and how much space they're taking up. It uses a technique called "squarified cushion treemaps" to give you a bird's-eye view of your hard disk. Below is a snapshot of what my 80 GB drive looks like in SequoiaView (click on the image to view the whole screenshot):
Each square/rectangle represents a file on my hard disk and the larger the rectangle, the larger the file is. Hovering the mouse pointer over a rectangle gives you a tooltip containing the name and size of the file. The giant rectangle on the right represents my free disk space. Using SequoiaView, I can clearly see that the main culprits are two files... and unfortunately both of them are virtual hard disks that I can't delete. On the other hand, I can free up a lot of space by deleting some CD/DVD images which I've already offloaded and burned to a DVD.
SequoiaView has a few extra features which are really useful. One of them is color-coding. For example, the green rectangles in the screenshot represent audio files. Color-coding also makes the treemaps much more pleasing to look at. Another nice feature is the filter. For example, you can tell SequoiaView to just display files accessed before a particular date so that you can get rid of files that you aren't using anymore. Needless to say, SequoiaView and all its neat features are available for free.
For helping squeeze out a little more mileage out of my hard disk, SequoiaView is this week's RubeTube Pick of the Week.
(Trivia: "Sequoia" is the shortest word in the English language that contains all five vowels: a, e, i, o, u. Amazing!)
80 gigs just doesn't cut it anymore. 160 will give you a lot more breathing room, but you're bound to hit the wall eventually. Burning DVDs is a great solution, but there's still the question: exactly what is eating up all your precious hard disk space?
SequoiaView is the answer. SequoiaView presents a visual representation of each individual file and directory on your hard disk and how much space they're taking up. It uses a technique called "squarified cushion treemaps" to give you a bird's-eye view of your hard disk. Below is a snapshot of what my 80 GB drive looks like in SequoiaView (click on the image to view the whole screenshot):
Each square/rectangle represents a file on my hard disk and the larger the rectangle, the larger the file is. Hovering the mouse pointer over a rectangle gives you a tooltip containing the name and size of the file. The giant rectangle on the right represents my free disk space. Using SequoiaView, I can clearly see that the main culprits are two files... and unfortunately both of them are virtual hard disks that I can't delete. On the other hand, I can free up a lot of space by deleting some CD/DVD images which I've already offloaded and burned to a DVD.
SequoiaView has a few extra features which are really useful. One of them is color-coding. For example, the green rectangles in the screenshot represent audio files. Color-coding also makes the treemaps much more pleasing to look at. Another nice feature is the filter. For example, you can tell SequoiaView to just display files accessed before a particular date so that you can get rid of files that you aren't using anymore. Needless to say, SequoiaView and all its neat features are available for free.
For helping squeeze out a little more mileage out of my hard disk, SequoiaView is this week's RubeTube Pick of the Week.
(Trivia: "Sequoia" is the shortest word in the English language that contains all five vowels: a, e, i, o, u. Amazing!)
Labels: free, hard disks, PoW, SequoiaView, software, tools
i'll definitely use this one. thanks for sharing! ^_^
i bet the larger areas are all anime :P
-binks
@Joemz: No prob, glad to help. :)
@Binks: Not on my office laptop. :D