Most users are satisfied with the hard drive utilities that ship with Windows–especially the more powerful partitioning and defragging tools found in Windows Vista and 7. Since you’re reading this, though, you’re obviously not a “most” type of user. Here are our ten favorite free utilities for partitioning, monitoring, and optimizing hard drives (as well as a few inexpensive for-pay alternatives). Despite offering some high-end features, these downloadable programs won’t bust your budget.
(For links to all of the downloads in one convenient list, see our “10 Best Free Hard-Drive Utilities” collection.)
Partitioning
Microsoft’s DiskPart–included for free on each Vista or Windows 7 installation disc–is a perfectly viable tool for manipulating FAT and NTFS partitions, but only if you’re in a command-line kind of mood. The vast majority of the time, I want something fast and graphical that supports all file systems.
Offering an extremely small footprint and very quick boots, Partition Logic seems to work fine, at least with internal IDE drives. My other favorite freebie is Easeus Partition Manager Home: It’s professional in appearance and has all the features I generally need.
SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology)
Today’s hard drives have a self-analysis feature that keeps tabs on the drive’s health. Unfortunately, although many BIOSs will relay the basic “Hey, I’m okay (or not)” information to you when you boot the PC, Windows 7 doesn’t provide a way to access the details. Several capable utilities allow you to view the information.
smartctl -a sda
(or sdb
, sdc
, or the like) will tell you everything you need to know about your hard drive’s SMART status–if you can read the sometimes overlapping information.
If you need constant Windows monitoring for a 24/7 PC, you’ll have to pay for a program such as Ariolic Software’s Active Smart 2.9 ($30) or LSoft Technologies’ Active Hard Disk Monitor ($6 and $15 Pro flavors).
Defragging and Optimizing
In days past (the age of FAT16 and FAT32), regularly defragging a hard drive made a noticeable difference in the speed with which it loaded applications and data–now, not as much. Even so, optimization–placing large, often-used files such as Outlook .pst files in the quickest-to-load location on your hard drive–can speed things up. (For more about the defrag debate, see “Defragging: Why, How, and Whether.”)
Disk Usage
If you have no idea what’s on your hard drive, or how much of it exists, you have a fascinating and visually appealing way to find out–Disk Space Fan. That isn’t fan as in fanatic, but as in the device for moving air. In this case you browse and tunnel down into the data on your hard drive by clicking on a graphic that resembles a fan. The pro features (finding duplicates, delete, move, and so on) are enabled for 15 days; after that, you’ll need to pony up $20 to do anything but view. Even without those features, however, the free version is neat. Really. Download it.