UltraSearch 

UltraSearch is designed to avoid the limitations present in Windows built-in file search feature. It has the advantage of providing very quick results without the need to index the contents of a drive. Instead, the application uses the information stored in the Master File Table of NTFS partitions. Unfortunately, this comes with a disadvantage: the tool supports only NTFS, which affects searching hard disks and portable storage devices using other file systems, such as FAT and FAT32.

The application has a nice interface. Yet, frankly speaking, I felt somewhat lost at first when trying to pick a search location. Therefore, it may be that the expandable drive overview is not a good idea after all. Fortunately, the excellent accompanying documentation helped me find my way. Soon I learned that I can also start a search from the system´s context menu as well.

Besides entering keywords to find the desired files and folders, you can use other procedures. For instance, you can exclude given elements. Additionally, it’s possible to create file groups or modify existing ones by altering the list of extensions they contain. This way, if you want to find, let’s say, all the videos stored on a hard disk, you simply need to choose the Video Files group and leave the search textbox blank. Luckily, the program saves the search patterns you have used recently so that you can use them again when it’s necessary. What´s more, the application supports using regular expressions to find given patterns within a text, which certainly helps make your search more accurate and efficient.

Once the results are ready, you can sort them in many ways, including size, extension, path and date. It is good that you can use different time/date formats as well as view file size using various units of measure, such as bytes, kilobytes, etc. Moreover, these results can be saved to a file or sent to a printer.

All in all, it seems to me that UltraSearch is a great choice, as long as your partitions use NTFS. The application is free, but, unfortunately, if you want to use other advanced features, such as searching network drives, you’ll need to buy TreeSize, a product by the same developer.