Never click through the Finder again.

How full is the archive disk? Where is the stick? Which drive is on the slow port? It is all in one list, with bars instead of columns of numbers — broken down into videos, photos, archives and documents. Eject one drive or all of them at once, and in the background at that: no waiting, no beach ball.

And because every drive has its own Trash, which the Finder only ever shows lumped together: DriveChief shows it per drive, along with the unnecessary system files nobody needs — and asks before you eject a disk that still holds either.

Which also means: you can empty the Trash of a single drive on its own — clear out the archive disk without touching the Mac’s own Trash. The Finder only knows “Empty Trash”, and that takes everything at once.

Disks that stay awake.

Hard disks in external enclosures spin down on the timer of their own firmware. The macOS setting “Put hard disks to sleep” never reaches that timer — which is why it does not help. DriveChief writes a tiny file during quiet spells and keeps the disk turning. One switch per drive — and only where something actually spins: on SSDs, cards and sticks it never appears at all.

And the interval is measured, not guessed: a test of its own works out, for each drive, after how many seconds of quiet this enclosure actually spins down, and sets the interval to match. Enclosures differ considerably in this, and serving them all on the strictest value wakes the rest more often than necessary.

And whether the switch is worth it for a particular drive, the app says itself: it counts what spinning down costs this drive in waiting time, and recommends it or advises against — with the right interval and a button beside it.

The ten seconds nobody counts

A drive that has spun down needs five to fifteen seconds to come back. If nothing measures that, you blame your Mac.

It happens quietly. You click a folder and nothing happens. Two seconds, five, ten. Then it is there. Nothing was broken and nothing hung — a hard disk had simply gone to sleep and had to get back up to speed.

DriveChief counts those seconds. Not its own, but the ones other programs cause: the Finder, Spotlight, your backup software, the image viewer building a preview. To do it, the app reads the counters macOS keeps for every drive anyway — it asks the operating system, not the disk. The measurement itself wakes nothing.

And it remembers whether anyone was at the machine at the time. That is the difference between a number and an answer. A drive spinning up at night cost nobody anything. The same drive doing it three times before lunch cost you half a minute of your life — every time.

Click your way through the storage.

The icicle graph shows the whole structure at a glance — each level a row, each folder a bar, as wide as it is large. And it is not just a picture: a click on a bar leads in, the next level moves up, a breadcrumb shows where you are. Going back works like a browser — forward, back, up one level, with ⌘[, ⌘] and ⌘↑ as well. The list below does the same. Once you have found the folder you were after, one click opens it in the Finder.

Coloured by kind, the tree shows where the videos sit and where the photos are. Where many small folders shrink to slivers, a zoom stretches the row until the names can be read again.

What has been sitting here for years?

People rarely clear up because a drive is full. They clear up once they know which part of it they no longer need.

The “Age” tab answers that with a figure rather than a search. It regroups the tree: the top level is five age bands — under a month, under 6 months, under a year, under 3 years, older. Only below them come the folders that fill them.

And see what has grown.

Not just what is large: the view compares two measurements and says which folder has put on weight, what is new and what has gone — with the figures before and after.

Ask once. Every drive.

You type what you are looking for, in ordinary words. DriveChief breaks the question into pieces you can see and change one by one: drive, kind, size, age. You see what will be searched for before it is searched, instead of working it out from the results.

It searches every drive at once — including the ones that are not plugged in. With a dozen external disks in a drawer you would otherwise ask a dozen times. DriveChief answers from its last measurement, tells you when that was, and names the drive you need to plug in.

Your query never leaves your Mac, and search also works without Apple Intelligence.

Two routes, one window.

Fast answers from the stored measurement — in seconds, and it knows drives that are not connected. Exact reads the drives themselves and therefore also finds what has appeared since the last measurement. The app picks a route for you; you can switch at any time.

Clean up without holding your breath.

A minus sits next to every row. One click puts a folder or a file into the collector — and the map instantly redraws as if the object were already gone. You see the result before you commit to it, and you gather up what should go at your own pace. No dragging, no multi-select: the minus in the row is the whole way.

A bar along the bottom keeps count of what you have collected; a window of its own lists everything with its full path and puts individual items back with an arrow.

You can collect across every drive, in a single window, grouped by drive. Moving to the Trash happens one drive at a time, with a button that names the drive. There is deliberately no button that clears everything away at once.

A memory for your drives.

What macOS knows about your disks it keeps to itself — and what happened last night it will have forgotten by tomorrow. DriveChief writes it down: when a disk had to spin up, how long a program waited for it — and, with a log archive read in, which one —, when a card was pulled without ejecting. That a disk had to spin up, DriveChief measures itself; no log is needed for that. Thirty days of it, filterable by drive and kind.

That is the difference between “the disk was slow the other day” and “six times in ten days, always during the backup, always this one”. Nowhere else on the Mac can you get at these figures.

Every detail of every disk — including the one in the cupboard.

One click on the drive icon on the left of the row and everything known is in one place: drive type, file system, encryption, connection path, last scan, spin-ups, disconnects, failed ejects.

The special part is the list above it. It also holds the drives that are not connected right now — with whatever was true the last time. “When did I last have that disk attached, how full was it, was it encrypted?” is a question macOS answers nowhere. And since the diagnostics started measuring speed, it also says how fast the drive was last time — as a row over time, not as a single number. And where the app recognises a Time Machine destination, it says how many days it has been away — without ever claiming that a backup succeeded. It does not look inside the backups.

Network shares, connected automatically.

Find network shares and reconnect them automatically at login — the switch sits per share, not per server. The app never touches passwords: macOS signs in using the keychain. What Bonjour finds on the network is listed on top; what you entered yourself — a server behind the VPN, say, which Bonjour never sees — sits below it, set apart and tinted. After switching networks you can therefore tell what has gone from what merely was not found .

The Screen Sharing button opens the selected server directly in the macOS Screen Sharing app.

And when a disk stalls anyway

A drive suddenly takes ten seconds to answer — and macOS does not say why. The diagnostics work through sixteen possibilities, name the source behind every finding and, where there is one, the way out.

Where a source is missing, the check says so — instead of giving an all-clear it cannot back up. Three of the sixteen read the system log; without an imported archive the diagnostics leave them out and say so in one sentence, rather than reporting the same thing three times.

How fast is that drive, really?

Not “410 MB/s”. Rather: is that right for this drive on this port — or is half of it missing?

The fifteenth check measures. It writes a gigabyte to every connected drive, reads it back — and puts the result next to what you should expect, instead of leaving it to stand on its own.

That difference is the whole point. 410 MB/s is excellent for a hard drive and alarming for an SSD on a 10 Gb/s port. Anyone looking at the bare number has to know what it means — and the person asking the question is precisely the one who doesn’t. So the expectation is the lesser of two things: what the connection can carry and what the medium can deliver. A hard drive on Thunderbolt is still a hard drive. An SSD behind a 5 Gb/s hub gives you half — and that is what it will say.

The test runs as part of the diagnostics, all drives in one pass. Its result stays in the drive record, and there the row of dots eventually answers the question a single measurement never can: was it always this slow, or only since last week?

Measured, not guessed.

Where guessing is not enough, it measures: the spin-down test leaves a drive alone on purpose and reaches for it again after 30 seconds, after a minute, after two, after four — until it has to spin up once. That settles how many seconds this enclosure takes to spin down, instead of estimating it. If you want, it works through up to half an hour of quiet.

The same rule applies here: if nothing is found, that means “did not spin down within four minutes” — not “everything is fine”.

So nothing falls asleep in the first place.

Maintenance sleep is what spins the disks down: macOS powers the USB storage drivers down to level 0 on every transition — no matter what the energy settings say. Keeping the Mac awake prevents that. One click is enough, with a time limit if you want: 30 minutes, one, two or eight hours — or until you stop it yourself.

The display stays out of it if you want: “Mac only” lets it switch off while the disks keep running. “Mac and display” keeps the screen on as well.

And the view answers a question that is otherwise hard to get at: who else is keeping the Mac awake. Other programs do, often without saying so. DriveChief shows the list macOS keeps of them — in words instead of abbreviations, with the reason beside it: not “PreventUserIdleSystemSleep” but “prevents sleep — backup running”.

Privacy

DriveChief sends nothing. No usage data, no crash reports, no identifiers. There is no server for the app to talk to.

What the app keeps on your Mac: the list of drives you have granted access to, your settings, the results of the storage measurements and a history of the events it observed over thirty days. All of it in the app's own folder on your Mac.

All of it can be deleted, in three places: measurements through “Discard…” in the storage view, the history through the history view, a single drive together with its past through “Forget this drive”.

A log archive you select for analysis is read and not kept.

Help

“Keep awake is on, the disk falls asleep anyway.” Some enclosures ignore write access as far as their timer is concerned. The spin-down test measures whether that is the case here.

“Why can't I see my drive?” Access has not been granted; Settings → Drive access.

“Why do I have to create a log archive for three checks?” Because macOS does not hand the running system log to an app from the App Store. The command is in the settings ready to copy, with a button that opens the Terminal right away.

Bug reports: In the app under Settings › Help › “Report a problem…” — that writes a report (version, drives, observations, the last log lines), reveals it in the Finder and opens a prepared email. If you only want to send the diagnostics, use “Export…” there.

Address:

Contact form: Write a message — no mail app needed.