Quite a variety of utilities for cleaning a HDD can be found by taking a quick look at search engines and software libraries; each of which will approach the matter of hard disk cleanup from a different point-of-view. A popular example is the hard drive cleaner, and many can be found on the internet. But this is not all that these software tools can do, there are many that also get rid of old data from free space, clean up porn files, detect the presence of illegal or unlicensed software, and reveal where all the free space on your disk has gone.

There are many arguments as to why deleting excess or useless files, especially large ones, can help with your system performance. Your PC's speed, when accessing hard disk files is a result to some degree, of the number of files on the computer drive. This is because you find that the file allocation system bloats and the hard drive works harder as the user needs to retrieve files. Due to the mechanism whereby file data is stored on the disc surface, files are no longer contiguous and this increases when there are more files on the drive. Your privacy is at stake too, as the number of private files increases, the higher the likelihood is that other persons using your system might discover them. And purging any private or undesirable files will obviously recover space which can then be put to other uses.