2014 MacBook Air-Storage Capacity 110GB?

[ihatepants]

I bought a MBA 13 inch early 2014 model yesterday (for $770 brand new from Best Buy, I was stoked! damn NY tax though...) and I just wanted to confirm how much space you actually get when you open it up.

Yesterday, when I opened my MacBook Air, it said 100GB out of 120GB were available! I was like hell noo....so I investigated and deleted a lot of the apps I didn't need (pages,numbers, garageband,iMovie, as well as the logic and garageband banks in the Library/Application Support folder).

I've reinstalled my computer 3 times (twice on recovery, once on homemade bootable USB) and still, now I'm at 110GB.

I have 1.28GB of pictures (???) and like 9.5GB of Other, so if anyone can confirm this is what they had, or how to get as close to 120GB as possible, please let me know!


I would've thought I would have 120GB free because the other 8GB would have been for systems operations...but I guess not.

 

[bit density]

I would've thought I would have 120GB free because the other 8GB would have been for systems operations...but I guess not.

You do not want to have a full hard drive, the operating system doesn't like it. And your issue is why MY number one BTO option is 256G. You can practically breath in that space. It is much harder in 128.

 

[ihatepants]

yeah thats true. but the problem is that I bought a really discounted MBA from best buy, so i couldn't afford a 256GB SSD (770 was a lot for me anyways, but it was a deal i couldn't pass up). Also, I can upgrade the SSD later right?

 

[Boyd01]

I don't think there are any 3rd party SSD replacements available for the 2013 or 2014 MBA yet. AFAIK, the only upgrade option at this point would be purchasing a disk that was removed from another computer. Most likely, it would be more than you want to pay. I understand that your budget is limited, but I would think hard about whether you should return the computer if disk space is going to be a problem. Then you could save some more money and get the 256 or 512 later.

BTW, we have one forum member here who says you should only use 60% to 70% of the available disk space. LOL

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1750531/

 

[ihatepants]

well i do have 115GB of google drive storage so thats a big help for me (returned a chromebook and they never took the storage back).

however, i am moving to LA from NY...soo i can't spend extra money nor save...because I'm leaving next week lol.

if anything, since MBAs retain their value, ill use this until I'm situated in california and then sell this and buy the 12" rMBA in october or a 13"rMBP. I guess its my only option

EDIT: also, you can confirm that my storage space of 110GB out of 120GB IS accurate, right?

 

[Dweez]

External USB3 drives are big and fast and cheap. Just sayin...

 

[ihatepants]

right, an external is a good solution....but..

is 110gb out of 120gb the right amount of storage i should be getting, or could i get more free??


....lol I'm sorry, i just really want to know!!..hehe i want my 120gb dangnabbit

if not ill just throw my macbook in a river and forget about it

 

[Dweez]

Check here for starters.

 

[ihatepants]

thanks, I'm still confused but i guess i kinda get an idea. i know i get 121gb total as per what disk utility says, but the actual amount is somewhere from 100-110gb free. i didn't know if anybody got any higher than that from like 115-120gb free.

 

[MartinAppleGuy]

thanks, I'm still confused but i guess i kinda get an idea. i know i get 121gb total as per what disk utility says, but the actual amount is somewhere from 100-110gb free. i didn't know if anybody got any higher than that from like 115-120gb free.

It is normal.

 

[iizmoo]

Did you disabled the built in time machine?

 

[ihatepants]

Did you disabled the built in time machine?

yeah i did that before


basically i guess I'm s.o.l. with storage. its been a day and I'm already down to 95gb....with random operations eating away at my storage. its unfortunate

 

[Truefan31]

I know people seem to like those jetdrive expansion cards. Like 80 for 128 gigs. Sits pretty flush in the sd card slot

 

[iizmoo]

yeah i did that before


basically i guess I'm s.o.l. with storage. its been a day and I'm already down to 95gb....with random operations eating away at my storage. its unfortunate

Dude, I stated out on my first SSD Mac in 10.6 with a 32GB drive, you got plenty of soace. Its worth noting that Apple SsD nowaday are very well made and you can go up to 100% utilization without really seeing any noticable performance degradation. With spinning drive you can notice actual performance slowdown at around 40% usage. My rule of thumb is if I'm using less than 80% of the drive and theres plenty of space for TRIM and other background processes to work, I'm a happy camper.

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I know people seem to like those jetdrive expansion cards. Like 80 for 128 gigs. Sits pretty flush in the sd card slot

Currently using the PNY StorEdge, good little 128GB SD card, I use it for work dropbox, work files, backups, and some other non essential stuffs. Warning for anyne using thse cards, they have a possibility of having a write error that will corrupt the entire file system, I had that happened a number of times when. I first got my cards (had to return one). That was a somewhat extreme case where I was writing millions of very small files to the disk. As long as you keep the file writes to larger and fewer files, and aren't doing continuous writes for like 5 hours straight, you're fine.

Still, would only recommend using SD cards for files you have in other backups like as the dropbox location, or as local time machine destination.