freeside

freeside watches your drives from the menu bar: free space, live read/write speed, and what's stopping a drive from ejecting. For Apple Silicon Macs.

"The disk wasn't ejected because one or more programs may be using it." freeside tells you which ones.

freeside is a sibling to flatline and follows the same rules: one narrow job, Apple Silicon and macOS 27 only, no root helper, and close to zero cost when nothing is happening.

Status: 1.0. Download it from freeside.banast.as; it updates itself. The PRD lists what was checked on which hardware (§9.1) and what's measured against its budgets (§8).

Features

• Free space for external drives, disk images, network shares and the internal disk, matching what Finder shows (including purgeable space on APFS)
• Read/write speed per physical drive, with a 60-second trace, for card offloads and project copies
• Eject blockers: when an eject fails, see which apps and processes are holding the drive and which files they have open, then quit them, retry, or force eject
• Who's using this? on any volume, without ejecting
• Menu bar shows a drive icon, free space on a pinned volume, or live activity, and switches to activity on its own while a transfer runs
• Optional notifications for low space and for a finished transfer
• Fixed-width, monochrome menu bar; terminal-style popover with a phosphor accent
• Launch at login, automatic updates via Sparkle
• No telemetry, no root helper, no kernel extensions

freeside can only see the current user's processes. When a system process such as Spotlight or Time Machine is holding a drive, it says so and offers Force Eject.

Requirements

• macOS 27 or later
• Apple Silicon (M1 or newer)

Install

Download the DMG from freeside.banast.as, open it, and drag freeside to Applications. It's signed and notarized, and updates itself through Sparkle.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Building

Needs Xcode with the macOS 27 SDK and XcodeGen.

xcodegen generate
open Freeside.xcodeproj

swift test --package-path Packages/FreesideKit runs the tests; some create and attach small disk images. scripts/release.sh builds a signed, notarized DMG in dist/ (it needs the Developer ID certificate and notary credentials described at the top of the script; --skip-notarize for a signed dry run).