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Xinorbis is a free disk analyzer that is easy to use and provides a lot of valuable information about hard disk usage. There is an installable and a portable version.
Contrary to other disk analyzers, Xinorbis allows you to specify precisely what folders and files you want to include in the report. This is useful because sometimes you only need disk information for a small portion of a large disk. You can choose specific folders, exclude folders and files, and combine folders from different drives in one scan operation.
After Xinorbis scans the hard drive, you can analyze the disk with different "tasks" that display the disk information in three ways: Summary, Folder Properties, and Folder Structure. You can also search the data.
Summary
The Summary view gives you a quick overview of the scan results. It contains information such as the disk space wasted, the largest folder, or how much space each file category (programs, graphics, office, etc.) need.
Folder properties
The Folder properties have much more detailed information to offer.
Table view: Diagrams the space usage of the file categories
Type view: Breaks down the categories in file types (extensions)
Extensions view: Gives more detailed information about each file extension
Folders view: Does the same for directories
Magnitude view: Arranges the information according to file size
Dates view: Structures the display according to years and months (creation date)
History view: Shows you the amount of data that has been created at configurable time intervals
Top 101: Shows the top 101 space squanderers
Null: Identifies files with 0 KB
Note that the different views don't just sort file names according to view topic. Each view presents the information in a suitable way and has its own diagram style. Often you can get more specific information by double clicking one of the entries.
Folder structure
The main purpose of the Folder structure task is to show you what percentage of the disk space is occupied by specific directories. On the left side, you have the main directories; on the right side, you can drill down in the folder structure.
Search
The search function can do more than the Windows Explorer search function provides. For instance, you can limit your search to a specific owner or files that exceed a certain size. You can also display how much space the files that match the search occupy. This can be useful if you want to know how much a certain file type requires.
Advanced disk analyzer
Aside from the Task views, there are four more "advanced" ways to analyze the disk data. The File Size Spread shows you how much space that files of a configurable file size occupy on the disk. Duplicate Files displays, well, duplicate files. Folder Detail is similar to the Folder Structure task except that it allows you to apply quite a few different filters (category, owner, file size, creation date, attribute, etc.).
Reports
Last, but not least, this powerful free disk analyzer offers a couple of nice reports in different file formats (HTML, XML, CSV, Text, Xinorbis). You can also access the data of former scans and analyze them again with Xinorbis.
Although this review might appear quite detailed, I didn't cover all of Xinorbis's features. There are many switches and handles that I didn't cover. If you need a disk analyzer to examine your storage, you definitely should have a look at Xinorbis. I tested Xinorbis 5.1.2.
