A quick search of the internet produces a wide range of software products that can approach 'hard disk cleaning' by implementing different techniques. A popular example is known as Snitch, which also has a free downloadable demo. There is usually much is more that that these utilities are able to do, several of these can also clean up orphaned data, clean up porn files, find programs that are not properly licensed, and show where your disk space is being taken up.

Despite it being obvious that cleaning up your hard disk offers clear benefits, risk must also be considered before doing anything. Keep in mind that critical documents may be lost by the software tools we may be using, or by accident when manually selecting files and folders for deletion. Removing redundant or files that are no longer needed takes time, more so if it is done by hand however software use will can consume time. But if care is taken these issues are insignificant and the performance benefits certainly outweigh these drawbacks.