#55. Funny Name, Serious Disk Analyzer

Ola, amigos, from the Tool Bar & Grill, where sometimes the Special of the Day is refritos. Today I’m serving up new information on a disk reporting utility that updates my previous post on the topic.

Back in November I reviewed a couple of great disk-space reporters (“What’s Eating You?”, post #46). These handy utilities analyze your hard disk and tell you what file types are occupying its space, and in what proportions. This information can be invaluable for diagnosing and resolving space shortages and other problems. Recently I came across another such utility, and found it well worth your consideration.

Xinorbis is the name, disk analysis is the game. This clever program provides a plethora of data about the condition of your hard disk and the files that fill it. Xinorbis can analyze any drive or folder. The illustrative screen below shows just one of many different views of your disk data.

You can filter and sort the information, and present it graphically as either pie or bar charts.
You can’t delete or move files from within the program, as you can with WinDirStat. And Xinorbis’s graphs and legends are smaller than those provided by JDiskReport, my previous recommendation, and thus are not quite as easy to read.

So if you want the most detailed data possible, use Xinorbis. If you don’t need that much information, stick with JDiskReport. And if you want a disk report that looks like modern art, and enables you to delete files without leaving it, go for WinDirStat.

Xinorbis is free, was updated quite recently to version 3.6, and works on all versions of Windows from 98 to Vista. The publisher, Paul Alan Freshney, also offers a number of other interesting, special-purpose utilities that you might want to check out.

I hope you’ll come back for more great utility reviews every week, and bring all your friends! Please feel free to share your thoughts by clicking on “comments” below or writing to jonathanstoolbar@gmail.com.