Even though the end result of spending time to do a full hard drive clean is worth doing, we must think about the negatives too, before beginning. We must concede that critical documents may be lost during the use of automated software or accidentally by the user. In any case the cleanup process for files in any case needs some time set aside, particularly when the manual methods are used but automated cleanup tools can consume time. For most people these risks are minimal and the gains clearly override any of these minimal shortcomings.

It's easy to come up with justification for why cleaning out unwanted hard disk files, from time to time, can help with your system performance. The overall performance of your computer, particularly while fetching documents and files from the drive is dependent upon, amongst other things, the number of files and documents etc. on the hard drive.