14 DAY TRIAL // If you're the type of user that has more applications, movies, music and other types of documents on your Mac's hard drive than one can shake a stick at, it's important to monitor the amount of free space available on your hard drive.
FreeSpace is a small tool that helps you in this matter and that can also be used to quickly and easily eject any mounted drives with a click of the mouse.
FreeSpace is a useful app if you have multiple mounted volumes, external storage devices, or disk images, because it automatically organizes them into categories and displays how much free space is available for each of them in your Mac's status bar.
The Looks
FreeSpace is available only as a menu bar item, and, although some people may dislike the fact that you don't have a main window where you can view and manage partitions/external devices, being a menulet makes it easier to use and it doesn't distract you while working.
FreeSpace's menu bar icon can display information for only one volume at a time; this includes the drive icon, the amount of available free space and, of course, the disk space measurement unit.
The Works
Any mounted device or disk image will automatically get pinned to your Mac's menu bar, even if it's a USB stick, network storage device or external volume.
Newly added devices are instantly detected; you can easily change the device whose information will be displayed in the menu bar simply by hovering your mouse to the left of the device icon and clicking the checkmark button.
All volumes can be ejected individually by using the Eject icon located in the menulet, next to the amount of available free space for each drive. In addition, when a lot of drives/devices/disk images are mounted, you can eject all of them at once by using the Eject All menu entry.
Volumes are ejected almost instantly, thus removing the hassle of having to unmount them one by one. The boot volume or any other partition on your boot drive will not be ejected using Eject All. These, with the exception of your boot drive, can safely be ejected by clicking the Eject icon next to their entry.
Most free space monitoring utilities come with an option to alert the user when a volume is low on space. FreeSpace does include this feature, although limited: it will only alert you if there are less than 200 MB available on any of your Mac's drives.
It would be nice if you could change the minimum amount to 1 GB, or 5 GB for example (or any other value for that matter), since it would suit the needs of more users.
Indicative of FreeSpace's user-friendly GUI is the fact that it automatically organizes your drives based on their type: Local Storage, External Storage, Disk Images, or Network Storage. This is useful because you will be able to easily view the drive type and so you can avoid ejecting another one by mistake.
Most of the time, the application will display the same amount of free space as the Finder, although there are some cases when you might notice that the two values are different. If you have a Macbook with OS X Lion and Time Machine's "local snapshots" option enabled, Finder sees these snapshots as unoccupied space, whereas FreeSpace considers them used space and adds their size to the overall occupied space on the Time Machine drive.
While some users say that an application icon would be enough, instead of displaying the device icon and the amount of free space, I tend to disagree. Showing how much space is available on your drive in the menu bar is what makes the application so great and the fact that you can see this at any time without having to click anything or go through countless menus is a plus.
I'd even like to be able to select the number of drives displayed in the menu bar at the same time. Yes, the menu bar will be crowded if you have a low resolution display.
The information displayed by FreeSpace directly in your menu bar can be customized by accessing the Menu Bar submenu located in the Preferences menu. Here, you can remove the volume icon, free space information or the measuring unit and even change the number of available decimals.
The Good
FreeSpace allows you to monitor the free space on your drives, eject them with ease and it will even alert you if a drive is low on free space. FreeSpace is also quite customizable: it allows you to select which information should be displayed in the status bar: the drive space, the drive icon, the measuring unit or any combination of them).
The Bad
While all current specs are working great, there are some features I would like to see implemented in future versions, like the ability to customize the minimum amount of drive space that triggers a low disk space alert, a feature that will surely be appreciated by anyone who encodes videos, for example. I would also like to be able to monitor more than one drive at a time on my menu bar.
The Truth
FreeSpace is one of the best free space monitors available out there. It's fast, reliable, low on resource consumption (during the testing process it constantly occupied 10 MB of RAM) and stable (it never crashed). So, if you want to monitor the free space on you drives and eject them with ease, I definitely recommend you give this app a try.
Here is a snapshot of the application in action:
