Drive Free Space

Sunday, August 8, 2004

There are several ways to get the drive free space:

1. The interop way.

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

[DllImport("kernel32.dll")]
public static extern bool GetDiskFreeSpaceEx(
        string lpDirectoryName,
        out UInt64 lpFreeBytesAvailable,
        out UInt64 lpTotalNumberOfBytes,
        out UInt64 lpTotalNumberOfFreeBytes);

ulong freeBytesAvailable = 0;
ulong totalNumberOfBytes = 0;
ulong totalNumberOfFreeBytes = 0;

GetDiskFreeSpaceEx(
   "c:\\",
   out freeBytesAvailable,
   out totalNumberOfBytes,
   out totalNumberOfFreeBytes);

2. The WMI Way

We can use WMI by connecting to the “root\\cimv2” namespace and using the “Win32_LogicalDisk” class. Programming WMI isn’t pretty, but you can use the WMI extensions for VS ‘03 Server Explorer which makes it tolerable. Once installed, you’ll get a list of the management classes in server explorer and you can simply drag and drop the disk volume that you want to pull information from onto your application designer.

You can then show free space on the volume with one line of code: MessageBox.Show(logicalDisk1.FreeSpace.ToString());

using System;
using System.Management;

tatic void Main(string[] args)
{
   WqlObjectQuery wmiquery = new WqlObjectQuery("SELECT * FROM Win32_LogicalDisk WHERE DeviceID = 'C:'");
   ManagementObjectSearcher wmifind = new ManagementObjectSearcher(wmiquery);

   foreach (ManagementObject mobj in wmifind.Get())
   {
      Console.WriteLine("Description: " + mobj["Description"]);
      Console.WriteLine("File system: " + mobj["FileSystem"]);
      Console.WriteLine("Free disk space: " + mobj["FreeSpace"]);
      Console.WriteLine("Size: " + mobj["Size"]);
   }
}

3. The Whidbey Way

System.IO.DriveInfo.AvailableFreeSpace

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