Monitor hard disk usage with Go

Programming Snapshot – Disk Speedo

© Lead Image © Author, 123RF.com

© Lead Image © Author, 123RF.com

Article from Issue 253/2021
Author(s):

To keep an eye on the remaining disk space during storage-intensive operations, you can check out this speedometer/odometer written in Go.

Storage-hungry applications such as video-editing software gobble up disk capacity like a massive vacuum cleaner: Before you know it, everything has been used up. In situations such as this, incorrectly programmed software tends to crash, and all the time you invested in your current project is irretrievably lost. If you take precautions up front, you can avoid headaches later on.

How about a constantly updated display of the remaining space on a dashboard-like instrument on the desktop, where you can see out of the corner of your eye how much disk space is wasted by an action that has just been triggered, such as rendering a video? You can write something like this quickly in Go.

On the Dashboard

A car's dashboard shows the current speed as well as the mileage. If you apply this to hard disks, the car's mileage reading becomes the total disk space consumed. Similarly, where in a car the speedometer needle shows the current speed, in the hard disk universe, the needle measures the space consumed per unit of time. The analogy for a storage-hungry application would be a speeding traffic offender, if you like.

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