Most of the best laptops and desktops these days have solid-state drives (SSD) onboard, but you might also see a secondary spinning hard drive for additional, but slower, storage. Regardless of which type you have, your computer will read and write data to your drive as you use it. So, if you want to take a peek at your computer’s operations and disk usage, you can easily use the Task Manager app in Windows 11. It’ll show you stats like active time, response time, read speed, write speed, capacity, and disk type.
How to monitor disk usage in Windows 11
Monitoring disk usage in Windows 11 involves using the Task Manager. There are three ways you can get to it.
- Simply right-click on your taskbar. Then, choose the Task Manager option. Click on the Performance Tab, and then click the disk that you want to see activity for. The C disk is the system disk, but you also can peek at non-system disks too.
- Right-click on the Start button, and choose Task Manager. Click on the Performance Tab, and then click the disk that you want to see activity for.
- Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete and choose Task Manager from the list of options. Click on the Performance Tab, and then click the disk that you want to see activity for.
Once the Task Manager is open, you will see a graph that represents how your disk is being used. If you’re performing a heavy file operation, like copying or pasting a file, you’ll see the lines on the graph go up or down to indicate its usage. This represents activity from the last 60 seconds. You also can look at the smaller graph under the primary one, which indicates the transfer rate in the last 60 seconds. Below that will be other information like active time, response time, read speed, and write speed. High read and write speeds indicate the disk is being used heavily.
That’s all there is to look at disk usage in Windows 11. It’s not to be confused with disk storage, though, which you can access by going to the settings app, choosing System, and then Storage. That settings menu gives you more ways to clean up space on your hard drive if you need to.