Disk Inventory X shows the sizes of files and folders as treemaps

Originally downloaded 6/10/06. This is one of two such apps–both free–that I’m adding to the Evaluate list. The other is one Macworld recommended called GrandPerspective. Both have very cool ways using treemaps to help you clean out unwanted files on your hard drives.

Update 9/5/06 Disk Inventory X is an excellent, incredibly flexible and versatile visual mapping tool for analyzing your hard disk by file size and type. You start by selecting a volume or directory to navigate, and the software builds a visual map that’s quite colorful and strikingly beautiful. It optionally includes views of your free disk space and “Other” file space. You can sort and see all files by type, and you can delete files directly within Disk Inventory or link to them in the Finder. The software has numerous nice interface and functional preferences.

Disk Inventory X automatically sorts its contents by size, starting with the directories. Within each directory, subsdirectories, and then files, are next sorted. This makes identifying the biggest space-hogs really simple, and it’s quite satisfying to zap a really large rectangle using Disk Inventory’s built-in Trasher. If you want to get really anal, you can choose to see the contents of application packages and whittle down inside there as well. I also love the software’s “Zoom” function, which lets you navigate down into folders and subfolders. For each file or folder, a separate Info pane provides detailed data to aid your quest for the most useless, largest chunks of occupied space on your hard drive.

The “Selection List,” a drawer that opens up from the bottom of the main window, is a marvel unto itself. Here, you can navigate a select list of the hundreds (thousands) of file types in your selection. The select list shows how many files of each type there are, but is sorted itself alphabetically. Once you choose a file type (e.g., zip), you can further sort the results by size, name, or path… or you can even do a live search for just files matching a certain string. You get the same contextual menu options here as elsewhere—reveal in finder, move to trash, or refresh.

You can also populate the selection list by selecting file types from the “File Kind Statistics” drawer, which opens on the left or right of the main window. This list is the same as the select menu described earlier, but it shows the color coding for each file type, as well as statistics for each type—total file space consumed, number of files. The information in this drawer can also be sorted, letting you easily concentrate on the file types that take up the most space, those with the most files, or by name. Each item here has a contextual menu that lets you see all the files of that type in the Selection List drawer.

My only gripe about the select options is that you can’t do multiple selections, except as folder chunks. You can’t, though, select just certain files in a folder—it’s either all or one at a time. A really trivial gripe is that users can’t change the colors assigned to each file type. (Like I said, it’s really trivial!)

All in all, this is a great app… and the best way I’ve found to clean out a large amount of file junk in a short amount of time, by concentrating on just the largest files. Its presentation is infinitely superior to using the Finder alone, since it can present data on all submenus at the same time, and you can easily see size relationships for all the files and folders on a given drive or directory.

Version as tested: 1.0