Such a variety of software tools can be found which interpret 'hard disk cleaning' in their own manner. Some basic research online will show just how many programs are able to clean porn and unwanted materials from your hard drive; and almost all of which feature additional cleaning capabilities. This is not the only function that these software tools can do, for example some can get rid of old data from free space, detect and remove pornography, detect the presence of illegal or unlicensed software, and reveal where all the free space on your disk has gone.

Drive cleaning applications mainly fit into a few key categories. The most popular seem to be the 'disk cleaner' or 'file cleaner' class utilities such as the free CCleaner software, that can clean hard drives, removing temp files, unnecessary files and recover room on the disk. Another class is the Privacy Cleaner style utilities designed to clean out evidence of browsing URLs and typed URL entries found in your browser, including 'evidence' and 'privacy' cleanup tools. Then there is the porn cleaner product, which is specifically used to disclose porn images and video files or offensive adult material and assists the user in deletion of any files that are not wanted. One more group of drive cleaning tools is the 'disk washer' style product, which, by writing random garbage over existing data, completely erases it from anywhere on the disk so that it cannot be recovered.