My first Vista installation consumed 28 GB - without any additional programs beyond the OS. I had read reports of the large on-disk Vista footprint and allocated a seemingly whopping 60 GB for the boot partition, but I was still stunned by the size of the base installation.
While trying to understand what could possibly consume all this space, I stumbled upon an excellent open-source tool to quickly map the contents of my drives. WinDirStat is an amazing little program that visualizes the contents of directories, drives or groups of drives, either directly-attached or mapped on a network.
The screen-shot below shows the location, size and type of files stored on my laptop's boot partition - all in a single pane. Each of the three panels is interactive, and highlighting one will automatically reference the other two.
WinDirStat enabled me to very quickly discover the causes of the Vista boot partition bloat and shrink the footprint to less than 10 GB. This limited the OS backup image to the somewhat more reasonable size of two DVD-ROMs.
The speed is surprising. A scan of my ~2 TB home network finishes in about 90 seconds. Unfortunately it could not handle 10's of TB's when run against some large NetApp arrays, but I wish there was something similar that could scale for enterprise-sized environments. This is an exceptionally powerful tool for uncovering and managing storage bloat.
Thanks for putting me onto this tool. Agreed that something like this for the enterprise would be great. So what are we waiting for? Lets talk to these guys and see if they want to work for NetApp!
Posted by: Aaron Hill | December 27, 2007 at 05:18 PM
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Posted by: lwpojhuis ajwultvr | March 25, 2009 at 05:19 AM