What Is Taking Up Space on My Hard Drive Windows 10 and How to Delete?

What is taking up my hard drive space in Windows 10?

 

I have a 300G system drive, there was a lot of free space, but last week, its free space is almost gone. My computer is very slow when it is running, and even crashes randomly. I don't know what is taking up my hard drive. How to find out contents that take up hard drive space and solve this problem? Any help will be greatly appreciated.”

 

How do I find out what is taking up my hard drive and free up?

Usually, hard drive space is occupied by system files, installed applications or personal files, backups, viruses or other malicious software, or other unknown files.

│Method 1. View contents and free up space via Storage Sense

You can view the contents installed on each hard drive by Storage Sense in Windows 10. And according to your own needs to uninstall unnecessary files. You can do like this:

Step 1. Press “Windows + I” on the Windows 10 desktop to open the settings. Then click System, and then select Storage.

Step 2. You can see all the hard drives on your computer and the space used here, you can also click onthe Storage Sense button to automatically clean up the files you don’t need.

Step 3. Click a hard drive, you will see its usage and choose a category based on storage, you can uninstall the files in these categories.

Now you should know how to check what is taking up space on hard drive in Windows 10and how to delete unnecessary files.

Storage Senseis a unique feature to Windows 10, if you are using another Windows system, then you cannot know what is taking up space on my hard drive in Windows 7 or 8 by this method. But don't worry, there are other methods you can try.

│Method 2. Make hidden files show to see what occupies space

Some files are hidden files, which will take up storage but will not be displayed directly in your drive, so you can make the hidden files visible and then delete them.

Opening the system reminding you of the full drive in “This PC”, in the upper left “Tools”, find the “File Options Folder”, and then find the second option “View”, in the advanced settings, find “Show hidden files, folders and drives”, click “Apply”. At this time, all hidden files have been displayed. Delete unnecessary files to free up space according to your own needs(Please do not delete system hidden files).

│Method 3. Delete backup files in Windows

Windows can help you back up your data and system regularly, so these backup files will take up a certain amount of disk space. You can free up space by deleting Windows backup files.

But what you need to know is that the backup file is mainly used for restoring system data after a computer system failure. For the computer disk, it takes up a lot of space, so after deleting it, you can release a lot of disk space for users to use, but after deleting it If the computer has a system failure, you have to reinstall the system.

│Method 4. Use powerful antivirus software

Sometimes, viruses or other malicious software can take up a lot of hard drive space. If you suspect that the lack of drive space is caused by a virus, you can use reliable antivirus software to run virus scanning and removal.

Quick fixes to free up disk space on Windows 10 hard drive or enlarge drive

Although uninstalling the applications can alleviate the problem slightly, many users do not like to use this method because most of the programs on the computer are useful and necessary for them.

Thus, we can also turn to the third-party tool——AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional to move installed programs to another drive to free up space. Or you can use its Allocate Free Space, Merger Partitions, Resize Partitions to extend the size of partition.

This is a powerful disk management software, highly recommended for Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP users. And its operation is very simple, even if you have no computer experience, you also can use it.

PS.: I will show you how to use these functions. You can download the demo version to try it out!

│Method 1. Use App Mover to free up hard drive space

 Step 1. Install and launch PA Professional, select the “App Mover” under "Free Up".

Step 2. When the main interface of this function is opened, select the drive where the application to be moved exists and click“Next”.

Step 3. In this step, tick the application you want to move and the location where the target application want to move. You can make multiple selections, then click “Move”.

Step 4. Hit “OK” to confirm the prompt and then, the transfer will get started.

Step 5. After it’s done, click on “Finish”.

After a few simple steps, you have successfully free up the space of C drive.

│Method 2. Enlarge partition via Allocate Free Space

The essence of Allocate Free Space is to allocate the free space of one partition to another partition, in order to extend the free space of the target partition. Please refer to my steps:

Step 1. In the main interface of AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro, select “Allocate Free Space”. (here, I choose D partition as the source partition.)

Step 2. Then type in the size of the free space which you want to cut from D partition and this free space will be directly added into the target partition.

Step 3. You can take a preview of the operation result before confirming start. Click “Apply” to execute this operation.

Note: This function can allocate free space from one partition to another partition when the two partitions are on the same disk.

Conclusion

“What is taking up space on my hard drive in Windows 10?” Now, I believe this is no longer a problem for you. Not only did I show you how to find these install files, but I also taught you how to free up space and enlarge the size of partition. In addition, you also can try Disk Defrag.  Defragmentation can improve the efficiency of the hard drive head seek and it is an effective way to increase the disk read speed.