DISK SENSEI MONITORS YOUR MAC'S DRIVE

Disk Sensei, as the name suggests, acts as your drive sensors; monitoring your drives and keeping you one step ahead from drive failure. It's a complete package that tells you all you need to know about your drive performance.

Disk Sensei provides advanced disk health monitoring tools, drive data visualization tools, basic drive benchmarking tools, and some nifty tools for optimizing your Mac’s performance.

Disk Sensei is also a good replacement for the popular Trim Enabler Pro. Similar to Trim Enabler, Disk Sensei allows your Mac to make use of TRIM for non-Apple SSDs you may have installed.

Pros

·        Easily enable TRIM support for any SSD connected to your Mac.

·        Fast. Disk Sensei responds almost instantly to most requests.

·        Supports hard drives and SSDs.

·        Drive health monitoring.

·        Real-time visual monitoring of drive performance.

Cons

·        The file cleanup system isn't intuitive.

·        The benchmarking system is very basic.

·        Optimization options are also basic.

Disk Sensei Features

Disk Sensei is primarily a drive utility for monitoring performance and predicting possible drive failures well before they occur. The app is organized into five categories:

Dashboard, for a quick overview of a drive's current state.

Health view, where the various S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) indicators supported by the drives attached to your Mac are displayed.

Visual, which uses a sunburst map to display a selected drive's file system. This is an easy way to get a handle on file size and location.

Tools, where you'll find various utilities for cleaning (removing) files, enabling TRIM, and optimizing a few of your Mac's capabilities.

Benchmark, which allows you to measure how fast your drives are performing.

Using Disk Sensei

Disk Sensei is well organized, presenting its categories as tabs across the top of the app window. In addition to the five tabs mentioned above, there's also an icon (dropdown menu) for selecting which connected drive Disk Sensei will present information about, and a Settings tab for configuring preferences.

The Dashboard tab displays basic information about the selected disk, including manufacturer, type of interface, and serial number. It also displays an overall health score, the current temperature, and capacity, plus the number, names, and other information about any partitions the selected drive contains.

Selecting the Health tab displays the current status of the S.M.A.R.T indicators; you can get additional information about each S.M.A.R.T entry by clicking on the item's name. 

This will reveal a brief description, including an indication of what the values being displayed mean. In addition, the values are color-coded, allowing you to quickly see if everything is working well (green), needs attention (yellow), or has moved into a critical stage (red).

The visual tab provides an interesting graphical representation of the selected drive's file system. Using a sunburst map, which represents files as petals of a daisy, with large petals indicating large files or folders, the map is an easy way to see how files are organized, as well as their relative sizes.

Unfortunately, this is simply a display; you can’t use this map to jump to a specific location within the Finder or mark a file for investigation or removal. In addition, this is perhaps the one place where Disk Sensei is a bit slow, although it's understandable that it would take a good deal of time to build up this file map.

The Tools tab provides access to four basic utilities; the first is the Clean utility, which is designed to help you remove unwanted files. 

This is also a place where Disk Sensei needs work; the process is cumbersome and requires you to dig down through a file list and place a checkmark on the files you wish to delete. It’s too bad you can't mark files in the Visual tab, and then see them listed here.

The Trim tab lets you turn TRIM on or off with the flick of a switch, which is much easier than using the Terminal command.

The Optimize tab lets you enable or disable a number of system capabilities, including turning off the Sudden Motion Sensor in Mac laptops, preventing local Time Machine backups (a good idea for Macs that only have an SSD for storage), and a number of other system-level services.

The Benchmark tab performs a basic performance test on the selected drive. This can be a handy tool for seeing how well your Mac’s drives are performing.

The Monitor tab displays the currently selected drive's traffic, that is, the reading and writing of files in real-time. You can choose to view the traffic visually, in which case a moving graph displays the read/write rate, the OPS/s rate (the I/O rate), and the overall utilization rate.

Overall Review

With Apple making it easier to enable TRIM, Cindori needed to add other capabilities to Trim Enabler to create a compelling app; Disk Sensei is the result. For the most part, Disk Sensei is easy to use and intuitive. A few areas could use some improvement, such as how files are selected in the Cleaning tab.

Overall, Disk Sensei is a handy utility for anyone who wants to monitor and work with their Mac’s storage system, to gain the best performance and monitor drive health.

Disk Sensei is $19.99, or $9.99 for Trim Enabler owners. A demo is available.