Disk space seems small. Any insight?

[dukebound85]

I have a mb and mbp...both with 500 gig hdds. Both are running 10.6.4 yet I am miffed by the available space. I recently installed a fresh copy of osx on my mbp and have merely been dragging info from the mb to mbp and yet the mbp has less available free space even though I have not transferred everything from the mb to mbp. I have added a few things to the mbp but nothing major (like open office) How is this possible?

When looking under my boot drive, there are 4 folders. Here are the respective sizes

MB

• 
  Applications: 10.53GB
  Library: 8.2GB
  System: 4.39GB
  Users: 286.11GB

Available free space: 188.67GB

Adding up the totals, I get 497.9GB....seems very close to the capacity of 500GB

MBP

• 
  Applications: 7.14GB
  Library: 5.57GB
  System: 4.61GB
  Users: 290.97GB

Available Free Space: 183.69GB

Adding up the totals, I get 491.98GB....while close to capacity of 500GB, it is alot further from it than the mb

Intuitively, the mbp should have more free space but it is a good 5GB less. Why is this? Why is it when I add these totals up, there is such a large discrepancy in relation to the original drive capacity (497.9GB for mb vs 491.98GB for mbp)??

 

[chown33]

How is this possible?

Hidden files.

 

[dukebound85]

Any way you know I can clean this up then?
When looking at hidden files at the boot drive level


MBP: 10.61GB

MB: 4.41GB

Why would the MBP have so much more GB in hidden files? An can I slim these down to the levels of the mb at all?

Thanks

PS: The main infringer seems to be the "private" folder with 9.46GB and then the "var" folder within it. private/var/vm/sleepimage

This sleepimage file is 8.59GB on the mbp and only 2.15 on the mb

This may be silly, but I know I could carbon copy clone the mb drive to the mbp drive and have it work as I have done that before with new laptops

My question is because I am able to ccc it....can I simply copy this private folder from the mb to the mbp and be alright?

PS: When I add the hidden file sizes to those above, it exceeds the capacity of the drive. How is this possible?


POSSIBLE/MOST PROBABLE EXPLANATION FOR THOSE THAT CARE DOWN THE ROAD

The sleep image file I have found out is dependant on the amt of ram one has and this makes sense (here is a link)
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/265475/

The discrepancy is most likely a result of the fact my mbp has 8 gigs of ram and my mb has 2 gigs which corresponds to the sleep image file sizes

A nice article on this
http://www.macworld.com/article/53471/2006/10/sleepmode.html