How much free space should you have on your system drive for optimum performance?

It is recommended to have 10 to 20 percent of the HDD's capacity unused, for temporary files.
But with such large HDDs, 100GB should more than suffice, but 2GB free HDD space is really not good. It can even lead to hardware failure.

That's A LOT of stuff! Sounds like you should be putting some of your less used stuff on an external. Other than that you could try deleting some of the crap (we all have it)

At this stage, having filled the disk up so much, you probably have many fragmented files. These are files which are recorded in discontiguous pieces on the disk. This slows things down.

File fragmentation means a more complex directory or index, which also slows things down.

I would recommend moving enough files off this disk to reduce the space utilization to below 80%. Lower if you plan to add stuff later. Then copy the remaining files somewhere else, erase this 1TB disk, and copy the files back. This will result in a defragmented disk that should perform well.

For even more performance, buy a 3TB disk, and copy all the files to that. The files will be much closer to each other on the larger capacity disk and take less time to access. As the disk fills up, access time will again increase.

When the Externel Harddrive arrives, i'd throw all the crap you need on to that, and do a clean reinstall of the entire system..

Try this. go to disk utilities and do a repair disk. This might fix the problem you are having.

Hi discofuel,
don't use that computer too much 'till you can clean it up some more.
This is a shot of my Mac using over 170Gb for VM (virtual memory).
This has to be provided by the HD, since you don't have that much RAM, do you?
If it's not available the Mac can lock-up & you'll have a hard time to fix it...:

kbarso said:

Try this. go to disk utilities and do a repair disk. This might fix the problem you are having.

Click to expand...

So you registered three years ago and the only post you make is a reply to a five months old thread, which you revive with your only post?
Why?

Stan Mikulenka said:

Hi discofuel,
don't use that computer too much 'till you can clean it up some more.
This is a shot of my Mac using over 170Gb for VM (virtual memory).
This has to be provided by the HD, since you don't have that much RAM, do you?
If it's not available the Mac can lock-up & you'll have a hard time to fix it...:

Click to expand...

That is not true.

As you can see from the above screenshot, I am having 176GB virtual memory. But nowhere on my 60GB SSD can this be found or even stored.
Btw, it is GigaByte (GB), not Gigabit (Gb), as 1B = 8b.

I use an app called daisy disk from the app store, pretty handy and very good looking lol