How to Check Drive Capacity on Your Windows 10 PC

PCs & Laptops For Dummies

One vital storage information tidbit you’ll want to know for your PC is a media’s capacity. Specifically, you want to ensure that free storage space on a device doesn’t get too low. If it does, the PC starts acting sluggish and might even refuse to install new software or save files. As with feeding peas to a 3-year-old, it’s a situation you want to avoid.

Check out storage capacity shown by device. A thermometer bar graphically indicates how much storage is used and how much is available. A better way to gauge capacity is to check the storage device’s Properties icon. Follow these steps:

Assorted storage devices on a PC.

Bring up a File Explorer window.

Press the Win+E keyboard shortcut.
In Windows 10, choose This PC on the left side of the window.
Right-click a storage device icon and choose Properties from the shortcut menu.

The device’s Properties dialog box appears.

Checking storage device info.

The information shown in the dialog box is unique to the storage device. Shown are the device’s name, type of storage, cryptic file system info, as well as used and free space. A handy chart illustrates storage capacity graphically.
Close the Properties dialog box when you’re done gawking.

When a device’s storage nears capacity, Windows displays a warning. Your job is to free space on the storage device or begin using another storage device.

Although watching capacity is a good thing to do, be aware that optical drives are always shown at full capacity. Unless you’re creating (burning) your own optical disc, the media appears to be full. This situation isn’t a problem.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.