v0.8.0 — High Velocity
WinBlaze is a high-performance disk-usage analyzer for Windows: a Rust NTFS scanning engine paired with a C++/WinRT WinUI 3 front-end and a GPU-accelerated Direct2D treemap. High Velocity is the first public preview — the app is feature-complete and fast, and this milestone marks the point where it scans a full system drive in seconds.
Highlights
- Scans C:\ in ~4 seconds. A raw-volume NTFS Master File Table reader enumerates ~2.3M files / ~547k directories end-to-end and paints an interactive tree + treemap in about four seconds on a warm cache — the engine itself finishes in ~2.7 s.
- The High Velocity design system. A red-on-black shell with a sidebar navigation rail, monospace status strip, and GPU-rendered visuals — Dashboard, Insights, Cleanup, Explorer, and Settings views.
- Live results while it scans. Folders appear in the tree as the scan discovers them; size rollups land the moment it completes.
- GPU squarified treemap. Extension-colored Direct2D tiles with progressive deepening that never blocks the UI thread, hover focus, and click-to-zoom.
- Persistent, incremental index. Compact binary snapshots reload instantly; Incremental rescan diffs against the previous scan and reports exactly what was added, removed, modified, renamed, or moved.
Performance
Measured on a live C:\ system volume (~2.3M files / ~547k directories / 464 GB), Windows 11, NVMe, warm cache:
| Stage | Time |
|---|---|
| Raw-MFT engine (scan → summary) | ~2.7 s |
| In-app scan, idle → idle (tree + treemap rendered) | ~4.0 s |
| Post-scan index flush | < 1 s |
| Worst single UI-thread stall | < 1 s |
That is the result of a sustained optimization effort: the raw-MFT full-drive scan went from 143.7 s → 2.7 s across the overhaul rounds, and the snapshot on disk shrank from 562 MB → 323 MB.
Compared to WizTree and WinDirStat (warm C:)
- WinBlaze: ~4.0 s to an interactive view.
- WinDirStat 2.6: ~10.5 s (multithreaded directory walk).
- WizTree 4.31: a comparably fast raw MFT read, but ~14–55 s to a fully materialized interactive view because it builds the entire file list up front.
WinBlaze reaches an interactive view fastest because it pages and caps the UI (paged tree, 8,192-entry live catalog, deferred snapshot) instead of materializing every file. See benchmarks/perf-overhaul-baselines.md for methodology and raw runs.
Full feature list
- Real NTFS MFT scanning (boot-sector geometry, runlist extents, USA fixups) with correct handling of deleted records, named streams, extension records, and hardlinks
- Parallel directory-walk fallback with junction/symlink cycle protection for non-MFT roots
- Expandable folder tree with logical/physical/count/timestamp rollups and paged children
- GPU squarified treemap with progressive deepening
- Instant search over the persistent index
- Cleanup center (largest files, temp/log potential) with Open-in-Explorer
- Insights (top directories, per-extension breakdown) and a capacity Dashboard
- Structured local logging; no telemetry
Download & run
Grab WinBlaze-v0.8.0-windows-x64-portable.zip below, unzip anywhere, and run WinBlaze.UI.exe.
- Run as Administrator to enable the fast NTFS MFT path; without elevation WinBlaze falls back to the slower directory walk.
- The root path defaults to
C:\— adjust it and click Start scan.
Requirements: Windows 11 x64 (build 19041+), with the Windows App SDK 1.8 runtime.
SHA-256 (portable zip): 603dbd2b745eb4ee6a68e1a336a44d4873c52a0be4d51a35cb01374f812ef712
Known limitations (this is a preview)
- Binaries are not yet code-signed, so SmartScreen/Defender may warn on first launch.
- No MSI installer or in-app auto-update yet — this is a portable build.
- Competitor timings and scale calibration are single-machine, warm-cache figures.
These, along with clean-machine release validation, are tracked in TODO.md on the road to 1.0.
Privacy
WinBlaze has no telemetry. It writes only local logs (%LOCALAPPDATA%\WinBlaze\logs) and its index cache (%LOCALAPPDATA%\WinBlaze\index).