Casting List of type string to DeviceInfo[]

Question

Is it possible to cast list of type string to DeviceInfo[]. I am fetching list of logical drives on my computer and casting it to list to remove my system directory(My Operating System directory). Now I want to cast that list back to DeviceInfo[] as I need to get the logical drive which has more space available.

DriveInfo[] drive = DriveInfo.GetDrives();
List<string> list = drive.Select(x => x.RootDirectory.FullName).ToList();
list.Remove(Path.GetPathRoot(Environment.SystemDirectory).ToString());

Thank You.

Answer 1

You don't have to do Select()

DriveInfo[] driveFiltered = drive.Where(x => x.RootDirectory.FullName != Path.GetPathRoot(Environment.SystemDirectory).ToString()).ToArray();

EDIT:

As @MarkFeldman pointed out, Path.GetPathRoot() gets evaluated for all of the items on DriveInfo[]. This won't make a difference for this particular case (unless you have like dozens of hard drives) but it might give you a bad LINQ habit :). The efficient way would be:

string systemDirectory = Path.GetPathRoot(Environment.SystemDirectory).ToString();
DriveInfo[] driveFiltered = drive.Where(x => x.RootDirectory.FullName != systemDirectory).ToArray();

Answer 2

Why not just use something like this?

List<DriveInfo> list = DriveInfo.GetDrives().Where(x => x.RootDirectory.FullName != Path.GetPathRoot(Environment.SystemDirectory).ToString()).ToList();

That would avoid converting to a string list, and preserve the type of the original DriveInfo[] array.

Answer 3

The code below will show the most space available;

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
namespace ConsoleApplication11
{
    class Program
    {

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            long FreeSize = 0;
            DriveInfo[] drive = DriveInfo.GetDrives().Where(x =>
            {
                if (x.RootDirectory.FullName != Path.GetPathRoot(Environment.SystemDirectory).ToString() && x.AvailableFreeSpace >= FreeSize)
                {
                    FreeSize = x.AvailableFreeSpace; 
                    Console.WriteLine("{0}Size:{1}", x.Name, x.AvailableFreeSpace);
                    return true;
                }
                else
                {
                    return false;
                }
            }).ToArray();

            Console.ReadLine();

        }
    }
}