Freeware Directory

Freeware - Disks HDD and Storage - Hard Disk Drive

DuBaron DiskImage is the the swiss army knife to backup and restore partitions, entire harddisks, usb keys, floppy drives and (read-only) optical media. It features built-in zip compression, it's own compression method for data > 2Gb, MD5 and SHA1 checksumming, a hex editor, and various tools like drive speed and seek testing.

Hard disk drive manufacturers have adopted a standard called S·M·A·R·T (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) which reports many internal drive performance attributes. This software monitors these attributes and alerts the user to falling values due to damage or wear and tear. By being alerted to falling performance attributes, chance of data loss is minimized since proper preventive action can be taken before disastrous drive failure occurs.

Disk Investigator helps you to discover all that is hidden on your computer hard disk, it can also help you to recover lost data. Display the true drive contents by bypassing the operating system and directly reading the raw drive sectors. View and search raw directories, files, clusters, and system sectors. Undelete previously deleted files. Verify the effectiveness of file and disk wiping programs.

TestDisk was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally erasing your Partition Table!). To recover lost pictures from digital camera or harddisk, run the PhotoRec command. Test Disk is OpenSource freeware.

Worried about hard-drive failure? Get HDDLife - a real time hard drive monitoring utility with alerts, malfunction protection and data loss prevention functions. This hard-drive inspector is an advanced proactive hard drive failure detection system that controls 100% of hard-drive risks. HDDLife is S.M.A.R.T. technology based and works both for single PCs and large computer networks.

Monitor the HDD free space just like the Task Manager does for memory and CPU, I did it just for playing with Windows APIs, but I found it very useful to learn about other applications' hard disk usage: Useful for understanding why your hard disk is always full!

This application gives you a nice overview of the free disk-space on selected partitions or network drives. Small window with easy access through an icon in the System Tray. Color selection; Customizable title image; Autoshade. Included with Space is an OPTIONAL plugin which shows the foldersize. If you choose to install it, the plugin installs itself in the Windows Explorer right-click context menu.

This application really makes life a little easier when you want to know the amount of space used by folders on your hard drive. This app makes it easy, simply run it, select your drive and the directory you want to examine. It will tell you how many folders, sub-folders and files, and their sizes

Roadkils Disk Speed performs a disk speed test and provides details about how fast your disks can transfer data. The information provided includes data transfer rate for linear reads, random read transfer rate and the seek time of the drive. An overall score is given so you can compare different brands of drives when purchasing.

Roadkil's Sector Editor allows displaying, editing, printing and searching of disks by invidual sectors. The information can be displayed and edited in ASCII or hexadecimal. Sectors can be copied and exported to files.

Disk Space Explorer is a simple utility that scans the entire hard disk and provides size-related information of each folder and its subfolders. This will allow you to quickly identify which folders occupy the most hard disk space. After scanning the hard disk it will provide you with the number of bytes, files and folders that currently exist inside a given folder (and its subfolders).

SpeeDefrag is a program which restarts your computer and runs only defrag.exe with optimized windows settings. This makes defrag work faster and SpeeDefrag will automatically shutdown your computer after completing the defragmentation process.

Freeware disk reporting tool for Windows, use Disktective to trace used space within your hard disk and directories. Disktective can handle 10 Gb or more. With Disktective you can find out the real size of your directories and disks - and see how used space is distributed inside them. Disktective creates reports, prints pie charts, exports to HTML and TreePad files. The program does not need to be installed or uninstalled.

Wasted is a utility to show how much space directories or files really occupy due to the cluster size. A cluster is the smallest allocation unit that can be written, even if a file is only 1 byte, it will occupy a whole cluster, typically 4096 or 8192 bytes. Wasted can also compare different cluster sizes.

PCISniffer performs a complete PCI-diagnosis. If you want to have the full control of your computer, you ought to know which devices are installed in your machine. Independently of the installed operating system the PCISniffer displays the PCI header data of all PCI devices on the BUS unaltered.

DiskSpy provides a detailed display of the capabilities of installed hard disk drives. Display of every sector, Search for ASCII character strings, Vertical and horizontal scrolling, Byte-, word- and doubleword-views, 7- and 8-bit-view on the ASCII display.

JDiskReport enables you to understand how much space the files and directories consume on your disk drives, and it helps you find obsolete files and folders. The tool analyses your disk drives and collects several statistics which you can view as overview charts and details tables. This is ad- and nag-free, uncrippled, binary, multi-platform software that is free of charge and that never expires.

ChangePI is a high quality FREEWARE snapshot-utility to track down changes on a drive. Simple and easy to use, less fancy or complex than many others out there. Initially created for own use, now put out for YOU! No change will escape the eyes of the Change Private Investigator. Needs BWCC.DLL not included, downloadable here

Every hard disk is too small if you just wait long enough! TreeSize tells you where precious space has gone to. TreeSize can be started from the context menu of a folder or drive and shows you the size of this folder, including its subfolders. You can expand this folder in Explorer-like style and you will see the size of every subfolder. Scanning is done in a thread, so you can already see results while TreeSize is working. The space, whcih is wasted by the file system can be displayed and the results can be printed in a report.

Active@ Kill Disk is a disk eraser program for secure formatting without any possibility of future data recovery. Detect and display information about all hard and floppy disk drives currently connected to your computer; Complete wiping out of all floppies and first detected hard disk drive by securely overwriting data to defeat available recovery software.
N.B.This is a DOS program that must be run in DOS mode and must be used with EXTREME care. We have listed it because it is an essential security tool to completely erase data if you are giving away or selling a system or used hard drive.