Disk Savvy v16 Review

One free disk space analyzer program you should check out is Disk Savvy. It's one of my favorites because there are so many custom options and valuable functions throughout every screen of the program. You'd think the software would be complicated to use, but it's not confusing in the slightest.

Noteworthy Disk Savvy Features

After spending some time with Disk Savvy, here are some of what I think are the program's most noteworthy features:

• Supports scanning directories, network shares, internal and external hard drives, and NAS devices
• Various options can be set before starting a scan, like the performance of the scan (full or low speed), folders that should be excluded, and several rules (e.g., search only for files larger than 500 MB)
• Displays the MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, or SHA-512 hash signatures for one or more files

Configuration and Folder Features

Handy features help you customize Disk Savvy:

• Disk Savvy can be configured to perform certain actions after a disk analysis. One example is to save a report to a CSV file if any folder is holding more than 10 GB of data
• If you find that you want to learn more about a folder, just right-click on it in Disk Savvy to open the folder in File Explorer; you can also search for files within that folder, copy or move the folder elsewhere, compress the folder, or delete it
• The data the program scans can be categorized in several ways so that you can quickly understand what's using all the disk space; this can be done by file extension, file size, creation time, modification time, last access time, creation date, file attribute, and others

Ease of Use Features

Disk Savvy is surprisingly easy to use:

• It's simple to see and export the top 100 largest files or folders
• Full reports can be saved to HTML, XLSX, TXT, CSV, XML, or PDF, and other disk space usage reports can be saved to a pie chart or bar chart.
• The search tool lets you quickly find data by name, extension, path, attribute, size, and many other parameters; the search results are categorized where the files or folders are listed on top and the file category options are just below them
• The very bottom of the program shows how many files are contained in the folder you're viewing as well as how much storage space all the files are using
• Any configuration changes you make to Disk Savvy can be backed up so you can restore them on a different computer

My Thoughts on Disk Savvy

I like Disk Savvy a lot, not only because the program is really easy to read and understand, but also because it provides lots of detail and different perspectives—super useful for helping to understand what types of files are taking up the most space on a hard drive.

All the folders Disk Savvy scans are listed on the top portion of the program so that you can see which ones hold the most and least data, while the bottom portion contains all the different ways to look at the files themselves.

The bottom portion is something I want to expand a little on because it's extremely helpful. After a scan, Disk Savvy can categorize the files it finds in many different ways. For example, if you group them by file extension and see that MP3 is the largest of them all, you'll instantly know that the bulk of the folder is storing music files.

Information Display

What I find equally appealing to how Disk Savvy displays this information is that you can open any subfolder from the top portion to immediately see the corresponding information reflected in the bottom portion. This means you don't have to re-scan anything, so long as the folders you want to check exist inside the parent directory that you initially scanned.

Since you're dealing with lots of data when you do a disk analysis, exporting the information to a file to sift through later, or to send to your tech support agent for help, is extremely valuable. Fortunately, nearly any screen you're on that's displaying folders or files can be exported to a file and saved to your computer for easy sharing.

One Caveat

One of the biggest problems I have with this program is that the free version is limited to showing only half a million files per scan. If that limit is reached, your only option to scan the rest of the files is to pay for the software.

You can get it from the official website above. It works with Windows 11, back through Windows XP, as well as Windows Server 2022 through 2003. Or, check out WinDirStat and TreeSize Free for some other free-to-use disk space analyzers I've reviewed.