Size isn't everything when it comes to useful downloads, and Tray Disk Free is a perfect example.

The 29k Windows only app goes resident in your system after launching and monitors the free space of any drive on your system. You'll barely notice the 1mb of ram it consumes.

Click the tray icon and Tray Disk opens its main window behind your other apps. Its taskbar button gives you a full display of free bytes on your drive and a percentage of total drive space.

Tray Disk supports command line arguments that allow you specify the drive to monitor, color of the display bar, and the number of seconds between updates. You can spawn multiple instances to keep tabs on other drives. It works well in the system tray but overwhelming on your taskbar. I'm guessing that the tray indicator will provide enough detail for most users.

Tray Disk is released under the GPL, and is for Windows only. Vista users will need to drop MSVBVM50.dll in the same folder as Tray Disk's executable.

Hard drive prices are so low now that it really makes sense to use an imaging program. That way you've got a perfectly cloned backup of your system exactly the way you have it configured in case of a crash, which is much more convenient than reinstalling Windows, activating, and loading all your applications all over again.

Here are four great apps to get the job done - without spending a dime!

DriveImage XML. Runtime Software has never placed too much importance on looks, and it's for a very good reason. Their software works really, really well. DriveImage was the first software I used to create images within Windows. Scheduled backups can be created with the Windows Task Scheduler and command line switches. DriveImage is free for private, home use only. Yes, Macrium Reflect does the same thing and looks nicer, but it's $39.99.

For a straight-up, drive-to-drive clone, you can use Runtime's Shadow Copy. Shadow copy is free for everyone, not just home users.

Like DriveImage, XXClone runs in Windows. It has an extremely simple interface, and gives you the option to copy volume ID to your destination and make it bootable. The interface also provides quick access to the Windows disk manager, in case you need to perform some quick drive tasks prior to cloning. XXClone is free for personal, private use.

Reading and writing to a Mac formatted drive from Windows couldn't be any easier than selecting the samba file sharing option in Leopard. This works great if you have 2 physical computers but what if you only have a Mac running Boot Camp? Since Leopard isn't running getting to that document on the Mac partition from Windows would be difficult unless you installed MacDrive.

Once installed, Windows Explorer is able to mount the Mac drives right along side your standard Windows formatted drives. You are free to access them like any other drive.

If you're worried that you may accidentally delete files off your Mac partition just tick the option to mount the drives in "read only" mode, thus preventing any accidents. MacDrive's options can be access by double clicking it's icon in the system tray. But once you have tailored it to your work flow you'll rarely have a need to access the options.

In our testing we found no noticeable performance drops while accessing standard office documents and music files. And even if there were any drops in performance, the benefit of being able to access files created on the Mac partition from within Windows more than makes up for it.

So if you have your Mac set to dual boot you may want to consider MacDrive in order to swap your documents back and forth.

Knowing the status of your hard drive is a great way to prepare for problems that may potentially arise. And thank to CrystalDiskInfo obtaining this information from your hard drive couldn't be any easier.

CrystalDisk will gather data from your hard drive and will let you know its current temperature, the number of power cycles and even the number of hours the drive has been on. All this information comes in handy when trying to determine the root of a system crash or data failure, especially when you're dealing with an older drive in a crowded system case where cooling may not be optimal.

In our testing, the program was very easy to use and recognized our drive right away. Fortunately for us, we had no issues but if we did, we had no doubt that CrystalDisk would alert us to the problem so that appropriate steps could be taken.

CrystalDisk is a free application available for Windows and is a bit of a must have tool in diagnosing hard drive errors.

There's more evidence that the mythical GDrive, Google's mysterious Google storage hard drive, could be real.

Google has apparently updated the name servers on GoogleDrive.com as noted by Garett Rogers. This could be one of the final steps necessary in launching the online storage solution. Could it be built into Google Apps? Or maybe a standalone service? We will have to wait and see.

GoogleDrive.com has been on quite a journey since its original registration in 2004. It sat parked until in 2006 it expired and picked up by a squatter. Then in July of 2007 Google's official domain management company took control on it. Now it's been transferred to Google servers.

Take a look at some other interesting domain names Google owns.

Lifehacker has updated their Windows Janitor script for keeping your Windows "junk drawer" clean. Most of us have a folder or two on our hard drives that are filled pretty much with things we don't need.

This could be your web browser's default download directory, which fills up with e-mail attachments, installer files, music, and videos. But whatever directory it is, odds are it's taking up more hard drive space than it should.

Windows Janitor lets you monitor a folder and regularly delete any file that hasn't been updated for more than 30 days. In principle, this should automatically clean up all the files you don't really need. But proceed with caution, because some files you download may think they haven't been modified in 30 days or more when you first get them. In other words, do not set Windows Janitor to monitor a folder if you've got files you can't afford to lose in it.

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to keep downloaded files from cluttering your hard drive. For example, you could set your desktop as your default download directory. You'll regularly be confronted with every file you've downloaded, which should serve as reminder to either file away or delete each downloaded file when you're done using it.

See that pretty picture? That's a representation of every single file sitting on a 100GB hard drive. The shiny purple spot on the bottom is the page file, and to its right are thousands of little yellow spots showing 5 years worth of photos.

WinDirStat lets you create art from your hard drive. But that's really a side effect of its primary purpose, which is to provide you with information about your disk use. We first told you about this free application back in 2005. But even though the program hasn't been updated since last year, it runs just fine on Windows Vista.

While Windows Explorer lets you order files in a folder from largest to smallest or vice versa, it's pretty much useless when it comes to figuring out why your hard drive is almost full. Not that you really need a program to tell you that you've been spending too much time on iTunes (or BitTorrent), but WinDirStat can help you track down large files on your PC.

Each chunk of colored lights represents a folder on your computer. Or if you can do without the visuals, you can just focus on the top window that shows you where your largest files are.

[via CyberNotes]

Online storage spaces are great for backing up music photos, and videos just in-case something horrible happened to your hard drive. We might not recommended storing highly secure stuff online, but online storage space can be a good backup alternative for most items.

There are a lot of offerings online that give secured online storage seekers a place to turn to, like Box.net, Xdrive, Divshare, and Dropboks. Steekr, a newcomer to the marketplace has just arrived in beta. The online service provides automatic backup software for Windows and Macs, with a 1GB limit for the initial beta testing period. Files that are stored online can be shared with friends, as well as played and accessed directly through a browser window. If you want to try this space out with a free 1GB trial, enter your email on the homepage for an invite. Look out for mobile data access in Steekr's future.

Steekr's rates range from 5GB for $11US up to 100GB for $37US.

[via webware]

I've got a bit of a stumper on my hands. Tomorrow, UPS willing, a brand new hard drive (and a couple other choice upgrades) will be arriving on my doorstep. The new drive is a 250GB SATA number--not a monster, but much bigger and much faster than the ancient 80-gigger I've relied on the for far too long, so the new drive is taking the throne as my system drive ASAP. Here's the stumper: Should I be lazy and just transfer the contents of my C: partition over to the new drive, or should I put a daisy-fresh Windows XP install on it and go through the dance of installing all my apps and tweaking all my settings again? With the former I'm up and running again in a matter of hours right where I left off, which is both good (everything is exactly where I left it, including all my settings and shortcuts) and bad (everything is exactly where I left it, including my bloated registry and debris all over my system folders). With the latter I blow the weekend on installing and configuring stuff and doing the inevitable troubleshooting, and the next two months tweaking it until it feels comfortable again. So which is the lesser of two evils?

Or is there a third option I'm not considering? Oh, I could take the easy way out and install Ubuntu or Vista RC2, but I'd still lose days and weeks on tweaking--even more, since both are less familiar to me than good old XP. Sorry, but I'm sticking with XP until now (though be assured I'll be rocking the VMware a lot more with my newfound hard drive space). At any rate, I want to hear about DLS readers' best kung-fu hard drive swapping and/or Windows reinstalling techniques. Pipe up in the comments below!

Always innovating, and recently told to focus on products that are already in development, the Googleplex has recently leaked a copy of the so-called Platypus client for Gdrive, its service for viewing and storing files on the web. Philipp Lenssen scored a copy, and reports that the product looks like it's intended for Google employees to share and store files. This tool encourages Google employees to use Platypus to store office documents, photos, and notes, virtually everything, except for sensitive data, most likely since the application is still in a testing phase, and not secure enough. Philipp could not get past the login screen, but was able to check out the Help, and the configuration files that were attached to the installer which he has published on his website. Only time will tell if this service will be released for public consumption by Google, and is additional evidence that Google is always innovating.

Do you think that Google purposely sets out to release small details about new and upcoming products, and updates when testing? Or do you think that they are just careless with their testing environment?

There have been several times in my computing career when a power supply or other component has died on me. When something is going wrong in your PC, it is good to know what is going on inside the box. You can get out your candy thermometer (or your significant other's I suppose) to test for PC component temperature or a great program to help test your systems heat and other PC vital functions is SpeedFan. This tiny app is great, giving you vital info on heat, fan speed, hard disk fan speed, and other information you may need in the process of troubleshooting. SpeedFan won't give you info on every component, but it certainly helps when troubleshooting heat issues. It has some features that over-clockers would make more use of, though I haven't tested them out yet.

SpeedFan v4.31

http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

MojoPac has the ability to transform your personal storage device into a powerful private PC. Your iPod, phone, USB hard drive, and your USB flash drive can all now be the only item you need to carry around to get the job done. With MojoPac installed on your device, and applications and files loaded, you can automatically launch your environment onto any host PC running Windows XP. Music, games, files, and applications are all accessible, within a local view.

MojoPac seems like a promising application, with some great features for security and protection, as well as convenience, and personal preference settings. A number of companies now have IT policies, and restrictions for what types of applications users can install on computers, running MojoPac on your device is a way around this. When you unplug your device from the computer you were using, there are no traces of your personal info that are left behind. It is a portable solution that can be loaded onto a number of different devices to ensure your job gets done, in a secure, convenient way.

[Via CNet]

Sometimes you want to know exactly what is going on with your hard drive. If that's the case, you'll want to try DriveGLEAM. It can monitor physical drives as well as partitions for activity, and report how much free space is left. All of this is done via system tray icons. DriveGLEAM is primarily a hard drive monitoring utility, but also has a few other tricks up its sleeve, like monitoring available system RAM and virtual RAM, as well as CPU load.

For the ambitious folks, DriveGLEAM also offers an odd feature of sending the hard drive's status to the parallel port so that physical LEDs can be wired to flash appropriately. Personally this is a bit of overkill (seeing the drive status in my system tray is good enough for me), but I can imagine that there are those of you out there for whom this would make a great mod.

A blog called Plasticsfuture has tests 17 different programs for making backups on a Mac and written up the results in an article called Mac Backup Software Harmful. Why harmful? It turns out that most Mac backup software will save your files but nuke some of the associated metadata. Of the 17 apps, only one gets a "Highly recommended" rating, and four get "Avoid at all cost." In the end, the choice is SuperDuper, a shareware app that's free for basic use or $27.95 if you need some extra features.