I cleaned 200GB of hidden junk using a Windows tool no one talks about

I didn't realize how much of a problem junk files can be until my web browsers started shaming me with low storage notifications. But I have a total of 2TB of SSD storage (NVMe and SATA combined), so where did all the space go?

For someone who installs tons of apps ranging from a 4MB Windows super app to running large language models using Ollama, I need more space than most people do. Instead of uninstalling one odd app or clearing up my Windows updates folder, I fired up WizTree, a free disk space analyzer, to see what's filling up my hard drives. After an hour of focused cleanup, I managed to free up a freaking 200GB of space that Windows' built-in cleanup tools completely missed.

Why are the built-in cleanup tools not enough

They're painfully slow and less detailed

Windows' built-in storage cleanup tools are basic. Disk Cleanup only lists the common folders like Recycle Bin, temporary files, and Windows Update files that are safe to delete without affecting your personal data. However, often it's your app installs, old files, or duplicates that are hogging all the space on your PC.

Windows also offers Storage Sense in the Settings app, which can show what files and folders are taking up the most storage. However, it's painfully slow and rescans every time you go back and forth between the folders. I tried using it to drill down into my user folders, but I gave up after waiting half a minute for each subfolder to load.

These tools still work if you only want to clear system files and your Recycle Bin, or have the patience to wait through minutes of scanning. But they're not ideal when you want to do some deep cleaning to reclaim as much storage as possible. This is where a dedicated disk space analyzer app like WizTree comes in handy.

Using WizTree to find the missing space

Fast and detailed storage breakdown

I've been using WizTree for a couple of years now, and it's been flawless, considering the fact that it's completely free for personal use. Yes, there's an annoying animated Donate button, but it's not a deal breaker. You need to give it permission to run as an administrator every time you run the tool so that it can scan your drive. After that, select the drive you want to analyze and click Scan.

For those who have used WinDirStat before, WizTree will feel strikingly familiar, except it's faster and comes with more customization options. In my testing, WizTree completed a scan of my 256GB NVMe SSD in about 5 seconds. When I tested WinDirStat on the same drive out of curiosity, it took roughly 17 seconds, so WizTree is genuinely quick.

The speed difference comes from how WizTree reads your drive. Instead of using normal Windows file enumeration like most disk analyzers, WizTree reads the Master File Table directly on NTFS drives. This bypasses Windows completely and dramatically speeds up the scanning process.

Once the scan finishes, WizTree shows a comprehensive breakdown of your storage. The Tree View tab displays folders sorted by size, giving a good idea of the directories that are consuming the most space. The File View tab lists individual files by size, so you can quickly spot large media files, old downloads, or duplicate movies hiding in nested directories.

From the file list, you can right-click any entry to open it directly in File Explorer through the standard Windows context menu. This makes it easy to locate and delete large files without manually copying the path and opening it in File Explorer.

More advanced features

Fine-tune how WizTree behaves

WizTree has a few tucked-away settings you can adjust, but the most helpful one is the option to always run it as an administrator. Turning it on saves you from manually running the app with admin rights every time you launch it.

You can also configure WizTree to scan drives automatically on startup, exclude specific folders from scans, and customize the treemap colors to your preference. The export feature lets you save scan results to CSV files, handy if you need to document storage usage over time or share reports with someone else.

Another feature I appreciate is the ability to scan multiple drives simultaneously. If you have both an SSD and a secondary storage drive, as I do, you can analyze them all at once instead of running separate scans.

WizTree makes it easy to find missing space on your disk

So what was taking all that space on my PC? Most of it was an old instance of Plex media server that now resides on a dedicated home server, but I never bothered to clean up the mess after migration. On top of that, I also found tons of duplicate files were hiding under nested directories that I never thought to check, including multiple copies of the same video projects.

WizTree found all of this in a flash. The built-in Windows tools would have had a hard time locating these files because they were buried too deep and weren’t classified as "junk." If your storage keeps filling up and you can’t figure out why, WizTree will show you exactly where those gigabytes went.