Insights on your disk usage with clarity and speed
A fast, lightest approach to disk usage analysis. Scan millions of items quickly without administrator rights, minimal memory overhead, and multidimensional age analysis.
Engineered for efficiency and privacy
Replaces slow legacy analyzers with a zero-telemetry, lightweight native architecture.
User-Mode Execution
Runs completely without administrator elevation or specialized driver requirements while safely reading user directories.
Minimal Memory Overhead
Built with Rust memory optimizations like string boxing, using ~108 MB RAM when processing over 1.2M files.
Multidimensional Plots
Go beyond treemaps. Cross-reference file sizes against modification dates to isolate forgotten archives instantly.
Disk Scanner Performance Comparison
All scans performed on the same Windows machine and drive
| Metric | Drive Sonar | WinDirStat | WizTree |
|---|---|---|---|
| Version tested | 0.6.0 | 2.8.0 | 4.3.1 |
| License | Apache 2.0 | GPL v2 | Proprietary |
| Runs in user mode (no admin required) | ✅ | ✅ | ❌[1] |
| Installed size [MB] | 5.7 | 7.1 | 20.0 |
| Peak memory usage (median)[2] [MB] | 108.7 | 239.6 | 635.2 |
| Warm scan time (median)[3] [s] | 3.3 | 9.1 | 6.5 |
| Cold scan time (single run)[4] [s] | 50.9 | 22.9 | 17.4 |
[1] Admin requirement: WizTree requires administrator privileges to read the NTFS Master File Table directly for its full-speed mode; without elevation it falls back to a slower standard directory scan.
[2] Memory usage: Median of 3 independent runs, same scan location.
[3] Warm scan: Median of 5 independent runs of the same folder, each app already opened once beforehand (warm file-system cache) — the scenario most users encounter when re-scanning (e.g., after deleting files). Because all three tools benefit equally from the OS file-system cache under this condition, disk I/O latency is minimized for each of them alike — this measurement isolates each application's own processing efficiency (directory traversal, tree construction, size aggregation) rather than raw disk speed.
[4] Cold scan: Single measurement per app, taken immediately after a full system restart. Cold-boot timings are highly sensitive to background OS activity (Windows Defender, Search Indexing, update services) and were not consistently reproducible across repeated trials on the same machine — treat as illustrative of first-run experience, not a guaranteed figure.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Drive Sonar open-source and free?
Yes, Drive Sonar is 100% free and open-source under the permissive Apache 2.0 License. You can view, audit, or fork the source code on GitHub.
Why does Drive Sonar excel at warm scans?
Drive Sonar is built in Rust with multithreaded directory traversal. When re-scanning directories already cached in system RAM by your OS, Drive Sonar processes tree aggregates and UI state with low memory usage.
How does Age Scatter Analysis help clean up space?
Standard treemaps only highlight file size. Scatter plots place file size on the Y-axis and file age on the X-axis, allowing you to instantly isolate massive files that haven't been modified in years.
Start visualizing your disk today
Lightweight cross-platform binary. Available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.