Windows stores a lot of information
about your disk drives, along with some useful tools for disk
maintenance, in their Properties dialog boxes. You can determine what
type of disk you are using, specify how you want to share the disk, set
up security, and more.
You can view properties for any device you
see in Windows Explorer: hard disk, optical drive, SSD drive, USB
thumbdrive, and so on. You’ll find the following tabs in the Properties
dialog box:
• General. Here you can view disk statistics, run Disk Cleanup, and set up compression and indexing.
• Tools. This tab lets you do a disk check (error checking) and run a defragmentation routine.
• Hardware. Lists all of your physical disks.
• Sharing. Here you can allow your disk contents to be shared by others and set their privileges.
• Security. This tab allows you to control which user accounts can access your disk and what rights they have (READ or WRITE).
• Quota. On this tab you can limit the amount of space each user account is allowed.
• Acronis Recovery. This is a custom tab installed by Acronis True Image software and is not part of standard Windows 8.
In Figure 1,
you see the General tab of the Properties dialog box for a system boot
drive. This is the tab you will visit the most. The General tab allows
you to do the following:
• Change the disk name
• View the file system
• View disk utilization statistics
• Open the Disk Cleanup utility
• Compress files on the disk
• Index files for faster searches
Figure 1. The General tab of a hard disk’s Properties dialog box
To view the Properties dialog box
1. Press 
+E to view Windows Explorer.
2. Tap and hold, or right-click, the disk of interest, then select Properties from the context menu.
Tip
You might wonder why the General tab
shows two different sizes next to the Used Space legend. The larger
number to the left is the size used on disk, whereas the number on the
right is the actual amount of disk space the files themselves consume.
The size of the files on disk includes the amount of disk space that is
currently assigned and cannot be used. Since files are placed into
units in sectors and don’t always fill up a sector, the additional
unused but unassignable space is what makes the size on disk larger
than the size.
