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Disk Inventory X was kind of nice, but it is painfully slow.

Are there any modern and faster alternatives?

I only care about the disk space, and not about the file type stats and about the graph which Disk Inventory X displays.

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The speed is primarily a function of disc size, number of files and disc speed. I doubt whether other applications can be significantly faster – patrix♦ Feb 9 at 10:27
@patrix uh? If, for instance, it was badly coded, of course there might be faster alternatives. How can you know it is state-of-the-art? – Lohoris Feb 9 at 10:46
Edited to point out I only care about disk space and not the other fancy stuff. – Lohoris Feb 9 at 10:46
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I didn't say it's state of the art. But traversing a filesystem and gathering statistics is bound to be slow due to hardware effects. And whether the application just reads file sizes or also the other stuff doesn't really matter. But let's see whether somebody comes up with answers. – patrix♦ Feb 9 at 10:47
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omnigroup.com/products/omnidisksweeper maybe? Not graphical though – patrix♦ Feb 9 at 10:53
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OmniGroup offers a free utility called OmniDisksweeper which lists files/folders sorted by size.

OmniDiskSweeper is really great at what it does: showing you the files on your drive, in descending order by size, and letting you delete them easily! It scans your disks as quickly as possible and shows you the facts — if a file doesn't make the cut to stay, just click the big Delete button and be done with it. It's a fast, easy way to find those large files cluttering up your drive and clearing them out for new, better things. Make sure you want them gone, though. There's no going back

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Orders of magnitude faster than Disk Inventory X, it would be great if not for some quirks, such as not being able to right click the files (to either open in finder or send them to the bin): it can only delete them. Still much better, though. – Lohoris Feb 9 at 13:12
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While modern and fast are not exactly the strength of a Java application, I can recommend JDiskReport. It's free and does only one job, displaying the sizes of directories on your hard disk.

However, it seems that the Mac OS X download is currently broken on Mountain Lion because of Gatekeeper, so I recommend the Linux, Solaris, Java enabled OS download and running the JAR directly, which works just a fine.

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Appreciate the tip, the jar ran just fine. Unfortunately it suffers from the same problem Disk Inventory X did: it takes ages to load a tree. Since OmniDiskSweeper is orders of magnitude faster, it can be done ;) – Lohoris Feb 9 at 13:13
ODS doesn't load the full tree at startup – patrix♦ Feb 9 at 13:18
@patrix and that's a pretty smart thing to do – Lohoris Feb 9 at 13:52
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Agreed. At least as long as you don't want to display fancy graphics as Disk Inventory does. – patrix♦ Feb 9 at 13:54

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