The process to determine the amount of available hard drive space varies depending on what operating system you’re using. To proceed, select your operating system from the list below and follow the instructions.

Windows Vista, 7, 8, 10,and 11 users

  • Press the Windows key+E to open File Explorer.
  • In the File Explorer window, in the left navigation pane, click This PC.
  • After selecting This PC, you see a section called Devices and drives.

Memory (RAM) and hard drive space are two completely different things. For memory, see: How to find how much RAM is installed on a computer.

  • Windows Vista, 7, 8, 10, and 11 users.

  • Windows 95, 98, NT 4.x, 2000, ME, and XP users.

  • MS-DOS and Windows command line users.

  • Windows 3.x and NT 3.x users.

  • Linux and Unix users.

  • macOS

  • How to find the hard drive type and specifications.

  • Each storage device has a status bar, the amount of free space available, and the total disk space.

Windows 95, 98, NT 4.x, 2000, ME, and XP users

  • From the Windows desktop, double-click the My Computer icon.
  • In My Computer, highlight and right-click the drive whose capacity you’d like to determine.
  • In the menu that appears, select Properties.
  • The Properties window displays the used space, free space, and the total capacity of the hard drive or other drives.

If you would like to view additional information, right-click the drive and select Properties from the drop-down menu that appears.

Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP users

If you are running Windows 2000 or Windows XP, My Computer also displays the total size and free space for each of the drives in the main window. If you want to view more information, and a graph of available space, follow the steps above.

MS-DOS and Windows command line users

Open the MS-DOS prompt.

You can also view the available space through MS-DOS.

To determine the available space on a hard drive using MS-DOS, we recommend using the dir command.

At the MS-DOS prompt, type:

dir

At the end of the directory listing, you see information similar to the example below.

2 file(s) 578 bytes 15 dir (s) 16,754.78 MB free

As you can see above, the hard drive has over 16 GB of free space. If you want to see all files and how much space they are occupying, type the following commands.

cd
dir /s

The command above lists all files on your computer (except hidden files) and displays the total amount of disk space they utilize, and free disk space.

  • See the dir command and cd command pages for further information about these commands.

Windows 3.x and NT 3.x users

In Windows 3.x or Windows NT 3.x, you can determine the available free space by highlighting the C: drive, and then looking at the status bar at the bottom of the screen.

Linux and Unix users

  • How to determine the amount of free disk space available in Linux.

macOS

To determine how much drive space is available on your MacBook or iMac, follow the steps below.

  • In the menu bar at the top of the screen, click the Apple icon to open the Apple menu.

  • In the Apple menu, select About This Mac.

  • In the System Information window that opens, click the Storage tab at the top.

  • How to regain computer hard drive space.
  • How to determine the size of a file or folder.
  • Take a closer look at your disk usage with WinDirStat.
  • How much is 1 byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, etc.?
  • Hard drive help and support.