Disk utility

This article is about disk utilities in general. For the similarly named Mac OS software, see Disk Utility.

A disk utility is a computer program that allows a user to perform various functions on a computer disk, such as disk partitioning and logical volume management, as well as multiple smaller tasks such as changing drive letters and other mount points, renaming volumes, disk checking, and disk formatting, which are otherwise handled separately by multiple other built-in commands. Each operating system (OS) has its own basic disk utility, and there are also separate programs which can recognize and adjust the different filesystems of multiple OSes. Types of disk utilities include disk checkers, disk cleaners and disk space analyzers

Disk cleaners

Disk cleaners are computer programs that find and delete potentially unnecessary or potentially unwanted files from a computer. The purpose of such deletion may be to free up disk space, to eliminate clutter or to protect privacy.

Disk space consuming unnecessary files include temporary files, trash, old backups and web caches made by web browsers. Privacy risks include HTTP cookies, local shared objects, log files or any other trace that may tell which computer program opened which files.

Disk cleaners must not be mistaken with antivirus software (which delete malware), registry cleaners (which clean Windows Registry) or data erasure software (which securely delete files), although multifunction software (such as those included below) may fit into all these categories.

Disk checkers

A Disk checker is utility software which can scan a hard disk to find files or areas that are corrupted in some way, or were not correctly saved, and eliminate them for a more efficiently operating hard drive. This is not to be confused with a disk cleaner, which can find files that unnecessary to computer operation, or take up considerable amounts of space.

Some disk checkers can perform a whole surface scan to attempt to find any possible bad sectors, whereas others scan only the logical structure of files on the hard disk.

Disk space analyzers

A disk space analyzer (or disk usage analysis software) is a software utility for the visualization of disk space usage by getting the size for each folder (including sub-folders) and files in a folder or drive. Most of these applications analyze this information to generate a graphical chart showing disk usage distribution according to folders or other user defined criteria.

OS-provided disk utilities

• Disk Utility in Mac OS
• Logical Disk Manager in Microsoft Windows
• Logical Volume Manager in Linux
• GNOME Disks (also known as Disks or gnome-disk-utility or palimpsest)
• CHKDSK
• fsck
• GNU Parted