Hddb is Blazing Fast File Search Utility for Windows

These days googling about everything has become a second habit. If you do not understand anything, just google about it and most probably you would find a site explaining it in great details. But google can only be used for the online content. If you are searching through the files stored on your hard disk, then you are stuck with Windows File Explorer search function which takes forever to go through your hard disk. A better alternative for searching files on the local hard disks is Hddb (short for hard disk data-base).

Hddb is a freeware tool that provides you blazing fast file searches in Windows. The author of the Hddb software says that it is created in honor to the Everything software that we have written about previously.

After the installation of the Hddb software, it launches by itself and creates a database of the file table of all of your hard disk partitions. On my test PC, it took less that 5 seconds to create the database of the files on 50 GB hard disk which is very impressive. After the database has been created, you can search for any files using their partial names, full names, file extensions or wild cards. As expected, the search is ultra fast – the results appear as soon as you type the search term.

Hddb - Fast File Searching

Just like Everything, Hddb does not search files for their contents which is a feature present in Windows Search. But unlike Everything, Hddb does not automatically scan your file system for the changes and update the database. In Hddb, you have to manually update the database for any selected partitions. You can do this by selecting Database → Build and then selecting a partition.

In the Hddb options (that you can open by using the hotkey Ctrl+P), you can choose to show folder sizes in the search results, allow multiple instances, exclude a folder or file in the database, and choose which partitions should be used when creating the database.

Hddb - Fast File Searching

Conclusion: If you are tired of waiting for the Windows Search to finish looking up for files on your hard disk, then you give Hddb a try. Even though Hddb does not offer file content search,  I am sure that you would not be disappointed by the performance and speed of the file searches.

You can download Hddb from http://hddb.s3-website-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com.