I'm personally quite fond of DaisyDisk on Mac, https://daisydiskapp.com/

Which uses a circular visualization

Daisydisk has probably the best representation of file usage that I have seen to date. The circular presentation works better for me than the 'blocks' of other systems.

I also really like the animation as you drill down into bloated folders - Really helps to bring attention to where you need to look in order to free up space. I can find offending files/folders much quicker in DaisyDisk that any other usage reporting tool.

I've always been a big fan of DaisyDisk — I used it just today to free up a whole bunch of space — but I thought I'd give FlameGraph a go. It helped me free up 2.2GB of totally valuable space (this is a 120GB MBP - brutal) with 2 clicks instead of the 6 it would have taken DaisyDisk.

DaisyDisk essentially shows the exact same info as FlameGraph — if you 'unwrap the wheel' it's exactly the same! — but the latter makes the excellent design decision to label many of the bigger directories on the graph, rather than just a single level in a key. Often, when you're looking for big directories, you're really looking for big unnecessary directories, and being able to see way ahead really helps.

I'm sure there are arguments as to whether it's the "best" representation, but I'd contend that it's the most intuitive.

It's probably the first OS X App where I bought licenses for the whole family; they all benefited from it.

I probably should have made more emphasis that it is the "best" that I personally have found.

Mainly in terms of ratios - I think my mind perceives size ratios better on a circular pie style presentation (as DaisyDisk does), rather than stacked blocks as most other utilities use.

For Windows: https://windirstat.net/

I prefer Wiztree (link below), especially on systems with much larger disks. Since Wiztree works by scanning the MFT it's about an order of magnitude faster than Windirstat or Treesize.

http://antibody-software.com/web/software/software/wiztree-f...

Hey, thanks for this. Was using WinDirStat. This is really fast! Plus I like the minimalistic interface.

    > Since Wiztree works by scanning the MFT it's
    > about an order of magnitude faster than [...]
    > Treesize.

That's misleading - TreeSize also works by scanning the MFT.

Thanks for the recommendation. faster than "space sniffer" as well.

Sadly as a consequence of this, it can only report file size, not disk usage. If you have a lot of folders with NTFS compression enabled, Wiztree becomes almost useless.

YES! I really wish there were others that scanned the MFT. I don't think Wiztree is as flexible with visualizations.

Space sniffer, treemap based, is my choice:

http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/

I like it too but I've found it to be pretty buggy sometimes, especially if the contents of a folder change or the folder itself is deleted while you're viewing it, you get an endless stream of Delphi exceptions.

And for linux/kde k4dirstat, https://bitbucket.org/jeromerobert/k4dirstat/wiki/Home

I prefer Disk Inventory X: http://www.derlien.com/ The map looks similar and you can delete stuff from the tree as well.

My favorite of the mac apps is Omni disk sweeper: https://www.omnigroup.com/more. It has no graphical visualization, but does list files sorted by size and color coded so it's easy to see which files in any given place are the largest.

I'm using this flame graph tool on Mac, and I much prefer its layout than tree maps. :)