When you first buy your new computer, it has a completely unused hard drive if you ignore the small portion used by the operating system and other essential programs. It seems like you will never be able to fully utilize this large hard drive. And one year later the same hard drive has hardly any space for copying your new video from your latest vacation with your family or friends. With millions of files on your hard drives, it becomes a time-consuming task to look for the files in your Windows PC.
You can save your time by using a freeware tool named SwiftSearch. This tool can access the MFT (master file table) of the file system to directly find the list of files stored in your hard drive. This way, it does not have to go through the usual route of searching the files on your hard drive and can show you the results in a fraction of a second. Furthermore, it does not index the files or saves the MFT data to a file making the search results always fresh and represent the actual files stored on your hard drives.
The user interface of the SwiftSearch is very simple. You can select one of the drives using a drop-down list box or choose to search all the drives. You can type in the search pattern using the wildcards or regular expressions. Finally, you can click on the Search button and it will fetch the results instantly.
You can right-click on any of these files in the search results to view the same right-click menu as you would see in the Windows File Explorer. You can also choose to dump this data to a CSV file that you can later access using Microsoft Office or LibreOffice.
You can download SwiftSearch from http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/File-Management/SwiftSearch.shtml.