Check Hard Drive Capacity in Windows 11 and 10: 6 Ways

The fastest way to check your hard drive capacity in Windows 11 or Windows 10: press Win + E to open File Explorer, click This PC in the left sidebar, and read the line under each drive — it says something like "226 GB free of 476 GB". The second number is the drive's total capacity, the first is what's still empty. That's it. Everything below covers the five other ways to check, what the numbers actually mean, and why a "1 TB" drive always shows up as 931 GB.

The refund Jake almost had to give

Jake runs a small mobile phone shop, and last month he started stocking a few budget laptops. On a Tuesday morning a customer walked back in with one of them, receipt in hand, furious. He'd paid for a 512 GB laptop. He'd opened This PC at home. Windows said the drive was 476 GB.

"You sold me a fake," he told Jake, loudly, in front of two other customers. "It's short by thirty-six gigabytes."

Jake didn't know the answer. So he did the only thing he could do in the moment: offered a refund on a laptop with nothing wrong with it, and lost the margin on the sale plus the restocking hassle — about the profit of a full day, gone, over a unit conversion.

That evening he called Ethan.

"Was it fake?" Jake asked.

"No," Ethan said. "Every 512 GB drive on Earth shows about 476 GB in Windows. Every 1 TB drive shows about 931. The manufacturer and Windows are counting in different units. If you'd known that, you'd have kept the sale — and honestly, the customer would have left happier too, because someone finally explained it."

So this post does two jobs. First, every way to check a drive's capacity and free space in Windows 11 and Windows 10 — there are six, and you only need one or two of them. Second, what the numbers mean, so the missing gigabytes never cost you a refund, a panic, or an argument.

Capacity, free space, drives and partitions — 60 seconds of vocabulary

Four words, then we're done with theory. Skip ahead if you know them.

Capacity is the total size of the drive — how much it could hold if it were empty. It never changes. Free space is what's left right now, and it changes every time you save a photo or Windows downloads an update. When people say "check your storage", they usually mean free space; when they say "how big is the drive", they mean capacity. Windows shows both on the same line, which is convenient.

GB (gigabyte) and TB (terabyte) are the units. One TB is 1,000 GB. A typical photo from a phone is 3–5 megabytes (MB), so one GB holds roughly 200–300 photos. A modern laptop drive is 256 GB, 512 GB or 1 TB.

And one distinction that trips people up later: a disk is the physical device; a partition is a slice of it that Windows shows as a lettered drive like C: or D:. One physical disk can appear as two or three drive letters. This matters when your "1 TB laptop" shows a 476 GB C: drive — the rest is usually sitting in a D: partition, and Disk Management is the tool that reveals it.

Method 1: File Explorer — the ten-second check

This is the method to memorise. It works on every edition, needs no typing, and shows every connected drive at once — internal, external, USB sticks, SD cards.

On Windows 11

1. Press Win + E, or click the folder icon on the taskbar. File Explorer opens.
2. File Explorer lands on a page called Home — recent files and pinned folders. Your drives are not here. Look at the left sidebar and click This PC.
3. Under the heading Devices and drives, every drive appears as a tile: a name, a coloured bar, and a line like "226 GB free of 476 GB". The second number is capacity; the first is free space.

The bar is a fuel gauge in reverse — the filled part is used space. It's blue normally and turns red when less than about 10% is free, which is Windows quietly telling you to clean up before things start failing.

Want more detail on one drive? Right-click it and choose Properties. You get a pie chart, exact used and free figures down to the byte, the file system (almost always NTFS — the format Windows uses to organise files on the disk), and the Disk Cleanup button. No need for "Show more options" here — Properties sits in the compact Windows 11 right-click menu directly.

On Windows 10

The steps are the same. The only difference: File Explorer opens to Quick Access instead of Home. Click This PC in the left sidebar and you're looking at the identical Devices and drives view.

If you prefer This PC as a desktop icon — the old My Computer habit — that's a two-minute settings change we've covered separately: how to display the This PC icon on your desktop. Then checking capacity is one double-click from an empty desktop.

Method 2: Settings — see what's actually using the space

File Explorer tells you how much is used. Settings tells you what's using it — apps, temporary files, photos, the lot. This is the method for the follow-up question everyone asks thirty seconds after the first one: "fine, 250 GB is used — used by what?"

On Windows 11

1. Press Win + I to open Settings.
2. Click System in the left column, then Storage on the right.
3. The top of the page shows your C: drive's used and total space, then a breakdown by category: Apps & features, Temporary files, Documents, and so on. Click Show more categories for the full list. The page takes a few seconds to finish counting — the numbers fill in as it scans.
4. This page only covers the Windows drive by default. For other drives, scroll down to Advanced storage settings → Storage used on other drives, and click any drive for its own breakdown.

Two categories confuse everyone, so here's what they mean. "System & reserved" is Windows itself plus files it sets aside for updates and memory management — typically 30–60 GB, and you can't meaningfully shrink it, so don't try. "Other" is everything Windows couldn't classify — usually large folders created by programs, games, or virtual machines. A big "Other" is the cue to use a folder-size tool and find the culprit by name.

On Windows 10

Same path: Settings → System → Storage. The layout is slightly older-looking — other drives appear under a link called View storage usage on other drives — but the categories and numbers work the same way.

Both versions also host Storage Sense on this page: the built-in janitor that automatically empties the Recycle Bin and clears temporary files on a schedule. Worth switching on; it's the "set it once" answer to a drive that keeps creeping toward full. It pairs well with Windows' scheduled upkeep generally — we've written up enabling automatic maintenance in Windows if you want the whole machine looking after itself.

Method 3: Task Manager — capacity plus "is it an SSD?" in one screen

Task Manager is best known for killing frozen programs, but its Performance tab is the fastest way to see three facts about a disk at once: its capacity, whether it's an SSD or a spinning hard disk, and whether Windows is installed on it.

1. Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc.
2. On Windows 11, click the Performance icon in the left rail (the little graph). On Windows 10, click the Performance tab — and if you only see a short list of programs, click More details first.
3. Click Disk 0 (and Disk 1, Disk 2 if present). The top-right corner shows the label — SSD or HDD — and below the graphs you'll find Capacity, plus "System disk: Yes" on the one Windows lives on.

Note what this view counts: the physical disk, not the lettered partitions. So a laptop with C: and D: carved from one 1 TB drive shows a single "Disk 0" of 931 GB here. That's not a bug — it's the truthful hardware view, and comparing it against This PC is a neat way to understand how your machine is carved up.

Method 4: Disk Management — the whole disk, including the hidden parts

This is the map view. Every method so far shows you drive letters; Disk Management shows the physical disks and every slice on them — including partitions Windows normally hides.

1. Right-click the Start button (or press Win + X). This opens a hidden power-user menu that exists on both Windows 11 and 10.
2. Click Disk Management.
3. The bottom half of the window draws each physical disk as a horizontal strip. The label on the left edge — "Disk 0, 931.51 GB" — is the disk's true full capacity. The boxes along the strip are its partitions.

On a typical laptop you'll see more boxes than you expected: a small EFI System Partition (about 100–260 MB — the machine's startup files), your big C: partition, and a Recovery Partition (usually 500 MB–1 GB, sometimes several GB on brand-name laptops — the emergency repair environment). Add them up and you reach the full disk size. This is the answer to "why is my C: drive smaller than the disk I paid for" — a few gigabytes are doing support jobs, on every PC, by design.

The old route from our 2015 version of this article still works too: right-click This PC → Manage → Disk Management. The Win+X menu is just faster. And for completeness: typing diskmgmt.msc into the Run box (Win + R opens Run — a small box that launches tools by name) lands in the same place. All three routes work on Home and Pro alike.

Method 5: PowerShell — and the 2015 advice we're retracting

First, the correction. The original 2015 version of this article told you to open Command Prompt and run wmic logicaldisk get size,freespace,caption. That was good advice for a decade. It isn't anymore, and we'd rather say so plainly than quietly delete it: Microsoft deprecated the WMIC tool, shipped Windows 11 24H2 with it disabled on fresh installs, and removed it outright in 25H2. On a current Windows 11 machine that command returns "'wmic' is not recognized as an internal or external command" — we ran it on build 26200.8875 to confirm before writing this. If you find wmic commands in an old script or tutorial (including ours), that's why they fail.

The modern replacement is PowerShell, and it's honestly nicer. If you've not used it: PowerShell is Windows' typed-command tool, and on Windows 11 it lives inside an app called Terminal.

1. Right-click the Start button and choose Terminal (Windows 11) or Windows PowerShell (Windows 10). No administrator rights needed for any of this.
2. Type the command below and press Enter.

Every drive letter, with free space and total size:

Get-Volume

You get a table: SizeRemaining is free space, Size is capacity, one row per lettered drive, already in friendly GB units. That single command replaces the old wmic line completely.

The physical disks — model names and true sizes:

Get-Disk

This is Disk Management's top-level view as text: each physical drive with its manufacturer model number and total size. Handy when you want to look up exactly which drive is inside a laptop without opening it.

The closest one-line equivalent of the old wmic output, if a script needs it:

Get-CimInstance Win32_LogicalDisk | Select-Object DeviceID, Size, FreeSpace

One honest warning about that last one, because it caught us during testing: it reports sizes in bytes, so a 476 GB drive prints as 511900254208. Fine for scripts doing their own arithmetic, useless for reading at a glance. For eyeballs, Get-Volume is the one.

Is the command line ever the best method for this job? For most people, no — File Explorer wins. It earns its place when you're checking a machine over a remote session with no desktop, writing a script that reacts to low space, or checking ten machines and want copy-pasteable output.

Method 6: Free tools — and when not to bother

Let's name what half the internet won't: you do not need to install anything to check drive capacity. Every top-ten search result pushing a "disk analyzer download" for this question is answering a different, harder question — or just funnelling you toward a paid product. For capacity and free space, Windows' own tools above are complete.

Third-party tools earn their keep for exactly two jobs Windows does poorly:

• Mapping what's eating a full drive. WinDirStat (free, open source) and TreeSize Free scan a drive and show every folder sorted by size, so the 80 GB of forgotten video projects has nowhere to hide. Settings' "Other" category stops being a mystery in about two minutes. That said, Windows can get you most of the way there with no downloads at all — we've shown how in finding which files consume your storage without any software.
• Checking drive health. CrystalDiskInfo (free) reads the drive's own self-monitoring data — temperature, wear level on SSDs, reallocated sectors on hard disks — and gives a plain Good/Caution/Bad verdict. Capacity tells you how much room a drive has; health tells you whether to trust it with your files. If CrystalDiskInfo says Caution, back up first and ask questions later.

Download either from its official site only — disk utilities are a favourite disguise for adware, and a fake "disk cleaner" can cost far more space and money than it saves.

Which method should you use? The 20-second decision

All six work on Windows 11 and Windows 10, Home and Pro editions alike — none of this needs gpedit or admin rights.

Why a 1 TB drive shows 931 GB — the missing gigabytes explained

Back to Jake's angry customer. Here's the explanation that would have saved that refund.

Drive manufacturers count in decimal: to them, 1 TB means exactly 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, and 512 GB means 512,000,000,000 bytes. That's honest labelling and it's printed on the box. Windows, though, counts in powers of two: what it labels a "GB" is really 1,073,741,824 bytes (1,024 × 1,024 × 1,024) — a unit technically called a gibibyte. Divide the manufacturer's honest bytes by Windows' bigger unit and the number shrinks by about 7%. Same drive, same bytes, two measuring sticks.

"So nobody stole anything," Jake said, when Ethan walked him through it.

"Nobody stole anything. It's like a road sign in miles and a car odometer in kilometres. The distance didn't change — the unit did. Windows even applies its unit inconsistently across the industry: your phone, a Mac, and the drive box all count decimal. Windows is the odd one out, and it's been the odd one out for thirty years."

Every drive size converts the same way, so here's the cheat sheet worth keeping behind a shop counter:

If the number matches this table, the drive is exactly what was advertised. On top of the unit conversion, a brand-new PC will show a little more "loss": the hidden EFI and recovery partitions from the Disk Management section, plus Windows itself occupying 30–60 GB of used space out of the box.

HDD or SSD — how to tell which one you have, and why it matters

Two kinds of drive live behind those capacity numbers. An HDD (hard disk drive) stores data on spinning magnetic platters — cheap per gigabyte, slower, and vulnerable to knocks because it's mechanical. An SSD (solid state drive) stores data in flash memory chips — no moving parts, many times faster, and standard in every recent laptop. The 2015 version of this article treated SSDs as the expensive newcomer; a decade on, the positions have flipped, and a spinning drive in a laptop is the exception.

Two ways to check yours, no downloads:

• Task Manager → Performance tab → click each disk — the label says SSD or HDD outright. Fastest way, covered in Method 3.
• The defrag tool: press Win, type defrag, open Defragment and Optimize Drives. The Media type column labels every drive "Solid state drive" or "Hard disk drive".

Why care? Because it changes what you should do with the machine. Jake now checks Task Manager on every used laptop that comes into the shop: if a Windows 11-era machine somehow still boots from a spinning drive, an SSD swap is the single upgrade that transforms it — usually cheaper than a RAM upgrade and far more noticeable than either. And if an old HDD starts clicking or a health tool reports Caution, the capacity question becomes urgent in a different way: copy your files off now, to an external drive or cloud backup, because mechanical drives rarely announce their retirement twice.

Checked the capacity and it's nearly full? Do this next

Most people who search for this topic aren't curious — the bar's gone red. Here's what low space actually does, and the order to fix it in.

What genuinely goes wrong on a nearly-full drive: Windows Update starts failing (feature updates want 20+ GB of working room), programs that write temporary files begin throwing odd errors, and an SSD slows down and wears faster because it has no empty cells left to shuffle data into. The practical rule: keep at least 10–15% of the drive free — on a 476 GB drive, that's roughly 50–70 GB.

The fix, in order of effort:

1. Settings → System → Storage → Temporary files. Tick the safe categories — Windows lists what each one is — and remove them. This alone often frees 10–30 GB, especially after a feature update leaves its 20 GB "Previous Windows installation" behind. Our separate guide to cleaning up system files in Windows walks through this in detail, including the classic Disk Cleanup tool that still hides in the Start menu.
2. Turn on Storage Sense on the same Settings page, so the temporary-file cleanup happens automatically from now on.
3. Uninstall what you don't use: Settings → Apps → Installed apps, sort by size, and be honest with yourself about the games.
4. Hunt the big files: WinDirStat or TreeSize from Method 6, or the built-in search trick from our no-software guide linked there. Old video files and forgotten downloads are the usual suspects.
5. Move the archive out. Photos and videos you're keeping forever but not touching belong on an external drive or in cloud storage, not on the system SSD. This is also, not coincidentally, your backup — a drive at 98% full and never backed up is two problems wearing one trench coat.

Two adjacent tasks people ask about here, which we've covered separately: clearing the traces of files rather than the files themselves — that's clearing File Explorer history in Windows — and the opposite problem entirely: one person filling a shared family PC. Windows can actually cap how much disk space each user account may use, which is its own topic: how to limit hard disk space per user with quota settings. This post checks capacity; that one rations it.

Still on Windows 10? Everything above works — plus one honest note

To collect the differences in one place: all six methods work on Windows 10 without changes worth relearning. File Explorer opens to Quick Access instead of Home; the Storage settings page uses the older layout with a "View storage usage on other drives" link; Task Manager may need a click on "More details" first; PowerShell opens under its own name instead of Terminal. The commands, the Disk Management window and the 931 GB arithmetic are identical.

The honest note: Windows 10's free security updates ended on 14 October 2025. Your machine still boots and everything in this guide still works, but running it unprotected on the internet is a bad idea. Microsoft's consumer Extended Security Updates program — free if you sync settings with Windows Backup, or a small one-time fee — now covers enrolled PCs until October 2027, and you enroll right from Settings → Windows Update. If your hardware qualifies for Windows 11, the free upgrade is the cleaner long-term answer; if you're weighing that decision, checking whether the machine has an SSD (see above) and enough free space for the upgrade's 20+ GB working room are the two storage facts you'll want first.

One genuinely Windows 10-era trick that still has fans: telling Windows to power down a spinning hard disk after a period of inactivity, to save laptop battery and noise. We've kept that guide up for the HDD holdouts: turning off the hard disk after idle time in Windows. (On an SSD it makes near-zero difference — nothing spins.)

Your questions, answered straight

How do I check my hard drive's total capacity in Windows 11?

Press Win + E to open File Explorer, click This PC in the left sidebar, and read the line under the drive — "226 GB free of 476 GB" means the capacity is 476 GB. For the physical disk's full size including hidden partitions, right-click Start and open Disk Management.

Why does my 1 TB drive only show 931 GB?

Unit conversion, not a fault. The manufacturer counts 1 TB as one trillion bytes; Windows measures with a larger unit (1,024-based), so the same drive reads about 7% smaller. Every 1 TB drive on every Windows PC shows roughly 931 GB. Nothing is missing and nothing was stolen.

How much free space should I keep on my C: drive?

Keep 10–15% free as a working rule — about 50–70 GB on a 512 GB-class drive. Below that, Windows Update can fail for lack of working room and SSDs slow down. The bar in This PC turning red is Windows flagging you've crossed roughly the 10% line.

How do I see what is taking up space on my hard drive?

Settings → System → Storage shows usage by category (apps, temporary files, documents). For a folder-by-folder map, use the free WinDirStat or TreeSize, or the built-in size-search method in our no-software guide linked above.

Do these steps work on Windows 10 as well?

Yes, all six methods. The only cosmetic differences: File Explorer opens to Quick Access instead of Home, the Storage settings page has an older layout, and PowerShell opens directly rather than inside Terminal. Commands and results are identical.

How do I check if my drive is an SSD or a hard disk?

Ctrl + Shift + Esc → Performance tab → click each disk; the label reads SSD or HDD. Alternatively open "Defragment and Optimize Drives" from the Start menu and read the Media type column.

Why is wmic not recognized in Windows 11?

Microsoft deprecated and removed the WMIC tool — disabled by default on Windows 11 24H2 fresh installs, removed entirely in 25H2. Old tutorials (including our 2015 version of this page) that used wmic no longer work. Use Get-Volume in PowerShell instead; it shows the same size and free-space data in cleaner form.

How do I check the capacity of a USB or external drive?

Plug it in and open This PC — it appears under Devices and drives with the same "free of" line as internal drives. If it doesn't appear there, open Disk Management to see whether Windows detects the hardware at all; a drive visible there but without a letter usually just needs one assigned (right-click the partition → Change Drive Letter and Paths).

Does a full hard drive slow down my computer?

Yes, in two specific ways: Windows and programs lose room for temporary files, causing errors and stutter, and a nearly-full SSD writes more slowly and wears faster. A drive at 50% versus 30% full makes no meaningful difference — the trouble starts in the last 10–15%.

What is the difference between capacity and free space?

Capacity is the drive's total size and never changes; free space is what remains unused right now. This PC shows both in one line: "226 GB free of 476 GB" is 226 free, 476 total, therefore 250 GB currently used.

My C: drive is much smaller than the disk I paid for. Where is the rest?

Open Disk Management. Either the disk has a second data partition (often D:) holding the remainder, or — on brand-name PCs — a few gigabytes sit in hidden EFI and recovery partitions. Add every box on the disk's strip and you'll reach the full advertised size, minus the normal 7% unit conversion.

Is Disk Cleanup safe to use?

Yes — both classic Disk Cleanup and Settings' Temporary files list only remove files Windows knows are disposable. The one item to think twice about is "Previous Windows installation": deleting it frees up to 20+ GB but removes your ability to roll back a feature update within its 10-day window. Everything else is safe to clear.

Keep going: the next storage job you'll hit

Revision note. Originally published 10 September 2015. Updated and tested for 1 August 2026 on Windows 11 25H2 (build 26200.8875) and Windows 10 22H2. Corrections to the original: the wmic logicaldisk command we recommended for years is now removed from Windows 11 (deprecated, then dropped in 25H2) and has been replaced here with PowerShell's Get-Volume