O&O Diskstat
Price: £19.99 Free trial: 30 days What you need: Windows 8.1, 10 or 11
We’re big fans of the free programs O&O Appbuster and O&O Shutup10++, and we know many readers are too. But the company also makes several paid-for tools, including the recently updated Diskstat, so we were interested to find out if this disk analyser offers good value for money.
O&O Diskstat shows you which files and folders are taking up the most space on your hard drive, so you can remove those you don’t need, such as unused programs and duplicates. You don’t need to enter your payment-card details or email address to try the software for 30 days, which is a big bonus, though if you sign up for O&O’S newsletter you can claim $10 (£8.30) off the licence price.
The program opens with a File Explorer-style list of the contents of your hard drives, as well as online-storage drives, including Google Drive and Onedrive. Click the Analyze button (see screenshot) to display details of each item’s size.
However, it’s the options at the bottom of the window that make Diskstat really useful. Click ‘Overview’ to see which types of file are consuming the most space – such as applications, videos and system files – and how their memory consumption has developed over time. Click ‘Largest files’ and ‘Largest folders’ to see the biggest space hogs in those categories, and right-click unwanted items to delete them. Strangely, Diskstat doesn’t ask you to confirm the deletion, but files are sent to your recycle bin if you remove them accidentally.
There’s also a Tree Map option that organises files and folders into appropriately sized blocks, but we found this a bit disappointing and confusing. The free disk analysers Wiztree (www.snipca.com/45422) and Windirstat (www.snipca.com/45423), provide clearer, colour-coded tree maps.
OUR VERDICT Don’t pay for it
O&O Diskstat is a good program, and its analysis of drives – including online-storage drives – is fast, accurate and detailed. But there are other programs that do the same job for free, so even with the newsletter discount it’s still an unnecessary purchase.