System Information - Odd info in Memory tab

SkaSocks · May 4, 2013

Hey all,

Having a strange reading on my System Information, Storage Tab, regarding the 'Other' bar. While it takes up the majority of my hard drive's disk space, the actual amount says it's zero kb. Anybody have any idea what's going on? Also, is there any way to reduce the amount of space this takes up? It's OS-related, right? About 50GB of my storage is being used up by my 'Library' folder so I assume so.

Screenshot is below. I'm running OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.3, on a Retina Macbook Pro. Tried verifying the disk in Disk Utility but it didn't change anything.

Thanks for your help.

benwiggy · May 4, 2013

There are some quirks in the System Info panel on Storage devices.

"Other" is everything not represented by the other categories. It therefore includes user documents that aren't audio or video, per-user application data, as well as system files.

You can use a utility like OmniDiskSweeper to find out what's taking up the most space.

GGJstudios · May 4, 2013

If you're wondering what "Other" category in the Lion/ML storage tab is about, this may help explain:

What is this "Other" in the storage tab? What is eating my space

For space issues not explained by the above, there are a few things you can try, some of which may or may not apply:

Begin by restarting your computer as a first step. This sometimes resolves issues.
For Time Machine users on notebooks running Lion or later, space may be consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled.

OS X: About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs
Check to see if some of the space is being used by your sleepimage file.
Check the System Memory tab in Activity Monitor to check page outs and swap used. If swap used is significant, restart your computer and track that value under your normal workload. If you have significant page outs under normal use, you could benefit from more RAM.
Search with Finder to see if the space is being consumed by a very large file or several large files. Adjust the 50GB in the illustration to whatever size you deem appropriate.
Use OmniDiskSweeper, JDisk Report, Disk Inventory X, DaisyDisk or GrandPerspective to see how space is being used on your drive. Some of these apps may show more detail than others, so try several.
Check your drive with Disk Utility: Using Disk Utility to verify or repair disks
Try re-indexing your drive: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes

Here are a few resolutions found by others with the same question:

Freeing up space in Mac OS X

How OS X and iOS report storage capacity

simsaladimbamba · May 4, 2013

As you can see from your screenshot, you have selected the STORAGE tab, the MEMORY tab is the one on the right.

Btw, "memory" is not the same as "hard drive / storage capacity":

It is recommended, to have 10 to 20 % of the SSD/HDD's capacity unused.
The above links also apply to SSDs.

SkaSocks · May 4, 2013

Thanks people, looking into this now. Downloaded OmniDiskSweeper and found a ton of crap I don't need, including several GB of iPhone backups I didn't know were still there. Going to look into this further though, see if there's anything else I can delete.

simsaladimbamba said:
As you can see from your screenshot, you have selected the STORAGE tab, the MEMORY tab is the one on the right.

Btw, "memory" is not the same as "hard drive / storage capacity":

Computer Storage: Ram vs. Hard Drive Space

RAM vs. Hard Disk

It is recommended, to have 10 to 20 % of the SSD/HDD's capacity unused.
The above links also apply to SSDs.

Whoops, yep, I meant 'Storage', not Memory. Thanks! Changing the topic to reflect this typo.

Weaselboy · May 4, 2013

SkaSocks said:
Having a strange reading on my System Information, Storage Tab, regarding the 'Other' bar.

Those numbers come from the Spotlight index, which can get corrupted. The give away is that 18.45EB shown for movies.

Just run the command below in Terminal and wait for Spotlight to reindex and check the numbers again and they should be accurate.

Code:

sudo mdutil -E /

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System Information - Odd info in Memory tab

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