by Maxwell Payne

Created on: February 24, 2009

Determining how much free space on your hard drive is something we'd all like to know quickly and easily, especially with the ever increasing music, movies, and files we keep on our hard drives.

Finding out how much free space is left on your hard drive is quite easy to do and this brief tutorial covers both Windows based systems and Apple based systems. These instructions will also allow you to see how much space is currently being used as well.

Windows based PCs:

To find out how much free space you have left on your hard drive as well as how much space is currently being used, simply do the following in Windows:

1.) Click the Start Menu

2.) Locate the 'My Computer' icon either in the top of the Start Menu or to the right hand side. Double click that icon.

3.) You may see multiple 'drives' including any external drives or MP3 players that you have plugged in and you may also see a few folders. Look for the hard drive that is usually named 'C:'.

4.) Right click on the C drive and select Properties from the menu that appears.

5.) You'll see the amount of free space you have as well as the amount of used space left. You may also see a nice pie chart that shows you the percentage of used space compared to the percentage of free space.

Apple OSX based Macs:

1.) On the desktop there should be a hard drive icon, usually titled 'Macintosh HD'.

2.) Right click on it and select 'Get Info' from the menu that appears.

3.) You'll see the total capacity, available space, and used space on the hard drive.

4.) If this isn't on your desktop, access your Mac dock and click on 'Finder'.

5.) From the Finder window, right click on the hard drive icon, titled 'Macintosh HD' by default and select 'Get Info'.

Keep in mind when viewing the statistics about your hard drive that the capacity may be different then the actual total amount your hard drive can hold. Say you have a 120GB hard drive. Your computer may say the capacity is only '116GB'. The difference is because the computer has partitioned the drive and used that part to store and access the root operating system of your computer.

Knowing how much free space you have left can ensure that you'll always have space for what you want and can get rid of what you don't want. A hard drive that is nearly full will affect the computer's performance so if that is the case, consider upgrading to a larger hard drive or purchasing an external hard drive.

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