UltraSearch review: free, index-free instant search for NTFS drives

Who UltraSearch is for

UltraSearch suits anyone who wants Windows Search-beating speed without installing anything that lingers. If the idea of a permanently running indexing service bothers you — on a locked-down work PC, a low-RAM laptop, or a machine you administer for someone else — UltraSearch gives you instant results the moment you open it and consumes nothing when you close it.

It's also a natural fit for admins and power users who already use TreeSize. JAM Software pitches the two as companions: TreeSize tells you where your space went, UltraSearch tells you where a file is. If you're hunting disk hogs specifically, our guide to finding large files on a PC walks through that whole workflow.

It is not for you if your files live on a NAS, a FAT32 USB stick, or an exFAT external drive — UltraSearch's core trick only works on local NTFS volumes. And if you mostly search inside files rather than by filename, an indexed tool will serve you better.

Key features

Direct MFT access, no index files

Every NTFS drive keeps a Master File Table — a built-in database of every file and folder on the volume. Most fast search tools (including Everything) read the MFT once, then maintain their own index from it. UltraSearch skips the second step entirely: it queries the MFT itself each time, so there is no index database on disk, no background service, and no first-run indexing wait. Close the app and it's gone from memory.

Results as you type

Type a partial name and matches appear and narrow with each keystroke. Wildcards (* and ?) and basic regular expressions are supported, and you can restrict the search to specific drives or folders.

File-type filters and exclusions

One-click filter groups (videos, images, Office documents, audio) sit above the results, and an exclude list lets you hide noise like C:\Windows or browser caches permanently.

Content search — on demand

UltraSearch can also search file contents, but understand what that means here: with no index, it must open and scan every candidate file on the spot. It works for "find the .ini under this folder containing this string," not for routinely searching a documents library. For everyday content search, see our guide to searching file contents on Windows.

Excel and CSV export

Results export to Excel, CSV, RTF or HTML with full path, size and date columns — genuinely useful for audits, cleanup reports, or handing a file inventory to someone else. Few free tools do this as cleanly.

Performance in our testing

On our reference machine (Ryzen 7, 32 GB RAM, NVMe SSD, a 1.2-million-file library), filename searches returned and refined results essentially as fast as we could type — in practice indistinguishable from Everything once both were running. The difference is at launch: Everything loads its prebuilt index, while UltraSearch reads the MFT fresh, which took a few seconds on first search of a large volume in our testing. After that, it felt instant.

Content searches were a different story, as expected. Brute-force scanning a folder of a few thousand documents took minutes, not seconds — fine occasionally, painful as a habit. Memory use was modest while running and, by design, zero when closed, which is exactly the appeal.

One requirement to know up front: reading the MFT directly needs administrator rights. On a standard user account or a corporate machine where you can't elevate, UltraSearch falls back to much slower behavior or simply can't do its main trick.

Ease of use

The interface is plain Windows utility fare: search box on top, results grid below, filters in between. There's nothing to configure before your first search, which is the point. Column sorting, right-click Explorer context menus on results, and the export options all behave the way a Windows user expects.

Two small annoyances. First, the free version occasionally shows promotional hints for other JAM Software products (TreeSize chief among them) — not intrusive, but present. Second, some advanced options are tucked into dense dialog boxes that feel a generation older than the main window.

Pricing

UltraSearch is free for private use, with no feature-crippled trial games. JAM Software sells UltraSearch Professional for business deployment, which adds commercial licensing plus extras like deeper search options and support; pricing is per-user and listed on jam-software.com. Home users lose nothing meaningful by staying on the free edition. If you're comparing free options broadly, our roundup of the best free file search tools puts it in context.

Alternatives worth considering

• Everything — the same MFT-based speed, but with a maintained index, network sharing via HTTP/ETP, and a far deeper search syntax. The closest competitor and, for most people, the stronger pick. See how it stacks up against the built-in option in Everything vs Windows Search.
• Agent Ransack — the better free choice when you need to search inside Office documents and PDFs rather than by filename.
• Listary — if you want fast filename search woven into launchers and file dialogs instead of a standalone window.

For the full field, ranked by use case, see our guide to the best file search software or browse everything that works well on this platform in our Windows file search hub.

Final verdict

UltraSearch does one thing — instant local filename search — and does it with admirable restraint: no index, no service, no install footprint beyond the app itself. Within its NTFS-only, admin-required lane, it's excellent and entirely free for home use. We score it 8/10: Everything's deeper feature set keeps it off the top spot, but if "fast search with nothing running in the background" describes what you want, UltraSearch is exactly that.