An Overview of programs to find duplicate files on your Mac (and PC)

I've recently noticed that programs to find duplicates on your hard disk appear to be quite popular, and there are plenty of them, even for Mac OS X.

I never really care for these tools as I think I keep my disks rather tidy - I've had 30 years to get used to this.

However, when I saw someone blog about yet another of these tools, I thought: Man, they're all doing it wrong. The tools are not as fast as they could be.

So I wrote my own quick'n'dirty proof-of-concept program to see how fast I can make it. Then I compared this with the tools that are available.

Here are the results:

Search a 500 GB Hard Disk with 270 GB used by 81.000 files, for duplicates > 200 MB in size.

My tool: 0:13 Decloner: 1:30 Chipmunk: 0:10 dupeGuru: 0:19 Tidy Up: 0:10 Araxis Find Duplicate Files: 2:40 (found all dupes, has no option to exclude smaller files)

Same volume, for duplicates > 0 kB in size:

...

Search a 240 GB SSD with 150 GB used by 1.436.000 items, for all duplicates > 1 MB in size. My tool: 1:50 Decloner: Chipmunk: 0:55 dupeGuru: Tidy Up: below 30s, it seems, but it missed out a large amount of files, not sure why. Skipping system folders, maybe?