Ever looked at that new disk you bought last month and found out it was nearly full? Which directories are the culprits and which files are hogging the disk could take a while to dig out. Should you resort to the command prompt or take that PERL tome off the shelf and finally decide to learn the language and write that one line program to list the top 50 biggest files and where they are?

Another way could be by using Moleskinsoft's Directory Size program, which can be used to scan your disk and put up the size of each directory and sub-directory. You can then drill down to the directories showing large storage sizes - those housing gargantuan files - and find out what they are. For me it's normally large OS image files, which I normally use to save the state of the operating system to a safe state, so I can re-image if the OS breaks.

We checked out version 2.2, and it's easy to use, although if you have a 50 terabyte storage system, expect to wait a fair while for it to trawl through all the disks. I dug out the culprits which were hogging my hard drive fairly quickly, but Directory Size also showed me a few files which I thought had long gone.

Directory Size let's you dig deeper into your folder and sub-folder structure until you get to the bottom level where all the files are. You can put filters onto your searches as well, and Directory Size can also give you pie-charted detail of your file size distribution, or who the owners of the files are, or what extensions the files in the directory contains, or you can search on specific time ranges. It allows you to dig out all those ancient files which were clogging your storage, and which you'll never need again. Well, at least until 5 minutes after you've deleted them ...

The software costs $27 (£18.50) for a single licence, and on the basis of a 'time is money' approach, it could be cash well spent.