A few days ago a friend of mine, a recent switcher to Mac, asked me – Why there is no hard disk activity indicator on Macs? I couldn’t tell him why, but I could feel the pain. When I switched to Mac a few years ago, I had the same issue, not knowing what the hard disk was doing was driving me absolutely crazy.

Fortunately another friend of mine suggested using MenuMeters, a tool that sits in the menu bar and displays the hard disk activity, network activity, CPU load and memory usage. Simple, unobtrusive and very efficient way to show exactly what I wanted. I have used it from the day one… OK, from the day 60 or so, and I couldn’t live without it.

This is what my menu bar looks like:

menubar.jpg

From left to right – Gmail notifier, MenuMeters network activity (top: upload speed, bottom: download speed), MenuMeters CPU load (can show individual cores or combined, as in my case) then the MenuMeters hard disk activity (the red arrow-down indicates h/d writes and the yellow up-arrow indicates h/d reads) and the rest are the well known AirPort, battery, time and Spotlight.

I don’t use MenuMeters memory usage indicator for one simple reason – if my Mac is low on memory I’ll feel it soon enough.

I know there are some other tools out there, but I found MenuMeters perfectly suited for exactly what I need, nothing too much, and nothing to miss. MenuMeters is free tool and you can download it via Raging Menace.