The primary reason why the Windows UI does not provide this functionality is performance. Every time you navigate through a folder structure in Windows Explorer, the OS would have to perform a recursive scan of the subfolder structure within each folder to get the file and folder sizes and add them up. The file allocation table holds the bare minimum data needed to properly operate with the files and folders. Even the smallest increase in the size of that structure has a huge impact on the wasted space.
Therefore it will be multiplied by the count of all the files and folders. That is why adding a folder size field that can be calculated from the already available data is not justified. A proper implementation would need at least 8 bytes per folder. If we need to add that to a drive with 1 million folders it will cost 8 million bytes.
Using the Folder Size Explorer context menu to calculate the folder sizes on demand solves both the redundancy and data integrity issues. As noted above the tool does not write anything to the system during the scan process. This means that it can not suffer from redundancy or data integrity issues. If a power failure occurs during the scan the only thing you need to do after restarting your computer is to run a new scan.
As only READ operations are performed even if you kill the tool during the scan it will not cause issues with the file system. The other problem with the display of folder sizes is data integrity. All the core file system operations are designed to be performed as fast as possible. This is important in order to keep the file system in a healthy state.
If a modification to the file system requires too many operations a failure in one of them may leave the system in an erroneous state.
Let's imagine that we have to keep information about every folder size. This means that if a file is resized we have to update the data of every parent folder that includes it.
Now if a system crash or power outage occurs this process will be interrupted. As a result, many folders will have incorrect sizes. We already commented in the performance section that thousands of files are modified every second.
What has to happen in this case is that when the operating system starts the folder sizes have to be recalculated which may require a lot of time on large volumes and slow drives. As you can see, while it would be great to have the folder sizes listed in Windows Explorer the drawbacks are much more than the benefits.
I personally would love to see the data integrated into Windows Explorer, but would not sacrifice the performance of my system or the life of my storage device. Maybe in the future, a new method of storing data will be developed that will make it easy to store folder size, but at this point, it is not a task that is worth the drawbacks.
Windows Explorer probably is the most used application in the operating system. Eldad Assis Eldad Assis 9, 10 10 gold badges 43 43 silver badges 74 74 bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Mark Amery k 67 67 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Nir Duan Nir Duan 5, 4 4 gold badges 21 21 silver badges 38 38 bronze badges. This is the most elegant solution if you don't require an integer return value. I guess it's not possible to print file sizes in some more useful units, like kB or MB, right?
Double quotes instead of single quotes. Joey Joey k 80 80 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Steve, in my eyes PowerShell is way more Unix-y than Unix in that most core commands are really orthogonal. In Unix du gives directory size but all it's doing is walking the tree and summing up. Something that can be very elegantly expressed in a pipeline like here So for PowerShell I usually look for how you can decompose the high-level goal into suitable lower-level operations.
I see, it seems to ignore hidden folders that way. Sum" — zumalifeguard. But perhaps such things are better asked as a separate question if you have trouble with that part as it has no relation to the original question here.
Show 10 more comments. Is there a way to show all the files and size in Mb in the base folder as well? Plus it breaks when there are lots of folders For example in the C: drive — Raunak Thomas.
That's how ft Format-Table works. You can try fl instead Format-List — frizik. Steve Steve k 21 21 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. That's hardly "without any 3rd-party tool", I guess. Oh right, but it thought that family should not be considered '3rd party'. I wholeheartedly agree though, that all the sysinternals tools should be included by default.
Although for many uses PowerShell is a quite worthy replacement. Did someone say Powershell? I suggest you all to download whatever Mark Russinovich develops : I keep seeing this name whenever I find a tool saving my life.
Show 1 more comment. Custodio Custodio 7, 13 13 gold badges 77 77 silver badges bronze badges. You can use the following command du -h -d 1 folder sort -h if you want human readable size, one level of subdirectories only, and sort by size. Ryan Lee Ryan Lee 91 1 1 silver badge 1 1 bronze badge. Works for me. Useful if your on a headless server.
Simple and elegant! I like this one best, but isn't the set-location unnecessary? It shows the size of all the folders in the whole PC in shape of a folder tree sorted by folder size. This categorisation helps the user to locate the trash files or empty folders no longer needed.
The user can free up space simply by deleting the said. The most liked features of this application are:. WinDirStat can show the disk usage statistics view and clean up the spaces for various editions of Microsoft Windows.
WinDirSat scans the whole directory of the PC and then projects the results in three functional ways viz. That's all about how to show folder size in Windows In addition, losing the account's password can make people suffer a lot. But with the use of a simple tool named 4WinKey , one can easily deal with such problems. This simple software product can come in real handy for the problems related to a lost password of Windows 10 PC.
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