It's easy to come up with justification for why clearing out old files, particularly those that are just taking up space on your hard drive, can provide several tangible benefits. The speed of your system when opening and saving files, is partly a result of the total file count on the PC's hard disk. So what is the reason for this? Well, you find that the file allocation system bloats and the system has to do more work whenever files are accessed. We also know that these files get broken up (fragmented) and this gets worse, the more files there are. Also in regard to your personal files, as you store more and more of your private files (banking, identification etc) there is increased risk that another computer user on your system could put your personal data to their own malicious uses. Additionally, cleaning up files will give back resources to the system that may then be used for storing files you do need.

Despite it being obvious that getting rid of unwanted hard drive files has benefits that are worth the investment in time, we have to think about the downsides prior to rushing in. Keep in mind that personal files may accidentally be erased either by automated tools and even when you handle the cleaning without use of software. In addition, getting rid of unneeded files consumes your time specifically when done manually but even using software for the task will take time as well. These are minor issues though and the gains are good compensation for any of these negatives.

A quick search of the internet produces a wide range of software products that look at the problem of drive scanning and cleanup processing by implementing different techniques. Many of these fall into the hard drive cleaner category, and there are many other examples that can be found using Google. But this is not all that software can do, some can clean up orphaned data, scan and remove inappropriate material, detect pirated software, and find out how to recover disk space.