Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Brand New 120GB MacBook Air & Already 23 GB Used? Whats going on here

V

VideoNewbie

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 6, 2009
476
6
so far i have firefox installed and thats it.

why does it say ive already used 23 gb of memory???

isnt the actual operating system only about 8gb of memory?

whats goin on here someone please help
 
VideoNewbie said:
so far i have firefox installed and thats it.

why does it say ive already used 23 gb of memory???

isnt the actual operating system only about 8gb of memory?

whats goin on here someone please help
Click to expand...

I would not call that unusual. You have a recovery, partition, a main partition with all of OS X, all of iLife, sleep file space, swap file space etc...

There are some drivers, language options, and some iLife apps you might not use to get back some space but that may only be 5-10gb depending.
 
Don't forget that there is also a recovery partition and the sleep file is equal in size to the amount of memory you have. So 8GB ram installed = 8GB sleep file reserved. Pre-installed programs such as Garage Band and iMovie are pretty big as well.
 
I'd say probably pretty standard to have about 20 GB of disk space used up out of the box due to OS, drivers, preloaded applications, and RAM.
 
MBA 2012 on Lion

It sounds kinda normal to me. If I do disk usage statistics and grep out the toplevelfolders on / I see my system without private data also ~ 25 GB

a
Code: 
cd / && sudo du -m . | grep [.]/[^/]*$
on my system gives me

Code: 
1	./.DocumentRevisions-V100
5	./.fseventsd
93	./.Spotlight-V100
0	./.Trashes
0	./.vol
7053	./Applications
4	./bin
0	./cores
1	./dev
1	./home
2996	./Library
1	./net
0	./Network
9268	./private
3	./sbin
3479	./System
14513	./Users
618	./usr
1	./Volumes

I've a couple apps installed and use homebrew for my unix like apps (that goes to /usr/local) which is ~ 0.5 GB. Out of the box /Applications should be ~ 5GB I guess. /private is only as big because of sleepfile in /private/var/vm which was already exlained. /Library and /System is your system data obviously... so here you go.

a
Code: 
du -hs /
gives me on my system 37GB. substract the ~15GB in my home directory leaves ~ 23 GB for the system...
 
Last edited:
mober said:
MBA 2012 on Lion

It sounds kinda normal to me. If I do disk usage statistics and grep out the toplevelfolders on / I see my system without private data also ~ 25 GB

a
Code: 
cd / && sudo du -m . | grep [.]/[^/]*$
on my system gives me

I've a couple apps installed and use homebrew for my unix like apps (that goes to /usr/local) which is ~ 0.5 GB. Out of the box /Applications should be ~ 5GB I guess. /private is only as big because of sleepfile in /private/var/vm which was already exlained. /Library and /System is your system data obviously... so here you go.

a
Code: 
du -hs /
gives me on my system 37GB. substract the ~15GB in my home directory leaves ~ 23 GB for the system...
Click to expand...

Not sure why you're mucking about with grep when du can give you all of the info by itself.

Code: 
 sudo du -d1 -h /

will give you a much more readable output

Code: 
7.6M	/.DocumentRevisions-V100
 52K	/.fseventsd
185M	/.Spotlight-V100
  0B	/.Trashes
  0B	/.vol
 14G	/Applications
3.8M	/bin
  0B	/cores
4.5K	/dev
1.0K	/home
7.9G	/Library
1.0K	/net
  0B	/Network
 38M	/opt
5.1G	/private
2.8M	/sbin
3.4G	/System
 14G	/Users
727M	/usr
 12K	/Volumes
 45G	/

B = Bytes
K = Kilobytes
M = Megabytes
G = Gigabytes
 
Pretty pathetic that the base OS and all its drivers use up over 20 GB. No wonder it's so slow and sluggish.
 
If you read the above carefully, you'll see that 20GB is not for the operating system and drivers - its for all that PLUS a recovery partition plus a sleep image.
 
Puevlo said:
Pretty pathetic that the base OS and all its drivers use up over 20 GB. No wonder it's so slow and sluggish.
Click to expand...

Haha !

Speed has nothing to do with the size on disk. Windows 7 is bigger than Vista but it's lots faster. It's obviously much, much bigger than Windows 95, but it's leagues faster. It's obviously tremendous amounts bigger than Windows 3.1, but it's in another dimension of fastness. Should I continue ?


Peter.
 
PeterJP said:
Haha !

Speed has nothing to do with the size on disk. Windows 7 is bigger than Vista but it's lots faster. It's obviously much, much bigger than Windows 95, but it's leagues faster. It's obviously tremendous amounts bigger than Windows 3.1, but it's in another dimension of fastness. Should I continue ?


Peter.
Click to expand...

Don't bother. It makes posts like that like all over the place and thinks it's funny or something.
 
PeterJP said:
Haha !

Speed has nothing to do with the size on disk. Windows 7 is bigger than Vista but it's lots faster. It's obviously much, much bigger than Windows 95, but it's leagues faster. It's obviously tremendous amounts bigger than Windows 3.1, but it's in another dimension of fastness. Should I continue ?


Peter.
Click to expand...

Ever run Windows 95 on a quad core? It's boots in under 3 seconds. And installs in less than a minute. You could even run the whole OS in RAM. OS X Lion is a slug in comparison.
 
Puevlo said:
Ever run Windows 95 on a quad core? It's boots in under 3 seconds. And installs in less than a minute. You could even run the whole OS in RAM. OS X Lion is a slug in comparison.
Click to expand...

Even a Skoda would be fast if you put a big engine in it; power and speed is one thing, reliability and handling another.
 
Puevlo said:
Ever run Windows 95 on a quad core? It's boots in under 3 seconds. And installs in less than a minute. You could even run the whole OS in RAM. OS X Lion is a slug in comparison.
Click to expand...

Well, technicly it wont run at all if you run the base 95 version, which has a bug if a cpu hits over 450Mhz you would moslty hit a BSOD within 3 seconds :)

But still i can't be amazed that everyone is complaing about 23GB of used space (yes its a tad much on the 128GB ssd) but have any of you bought a new PC (yes with windows) that got so much bloatware on it that you would prolly cap 40GB nowadays.
 
theSeb said:
Not sure why you're mucking about with grep when du can give you all of the info by itself.

Code: 
 sudo du -d1 -h /
Click to expand...

because I use grep and regex on a daily base at work and I had this as bash function I've in place for years now. Didn't know the du -d1 option. You don't have to cat the -h option, instead you can do

Code: 
du -d1h
which does the same thing... much nice output though!
 
mober said:
because I use grep and regex on a daily base at work and I had this as bash function I've in place for years now. Didn't know the du -d1 option. You don't have to cat the -h option, instead you can do

Code: 
du -d1h
which does the same thing... much nice output though!
Click to expand...

Old habits are hard to overcome. Thanks for the tip about concatenating the options.
 
Yesterday unboxed MBA 128Gb and just booting for first time there was 105Gb free from 128Gb.Also the preferences showed that real size of this SSD is 120Gb (not 128Gb).So as all mates said between recovery partition,sleep and OSX gets that amount of gb filled.

In conclusion,just don't worry and enjoy the toy because everyone gots same amount of free space :p
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back