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Hard Drive capacity question or confusion...Yes, I'm a newbie. Please help

littlemissGTO

littlemissGTO

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 21, 2006
62
4
Detroit,MI
I have a PowerBook G4. The hard drive is an 80GB. I have roughly 54GB tied up with iTunes. I've gotten one error message that says my start up disk is almost full. When I'm looking at the macintosh (my harddrive window) it says I've got 2.7GB free space. I don't have any movies stored. I don't have any games. I mostly use my mac for surfing the internet and music. I've made a few (maybe four at the most) ringtones using Garageband. So I don't have a lot of space tied up there.
Where did the rest of my free space go? I'm used to using a PC and trying to figure this along with some other minor stuff out is giving me a bit of a fit. I've downloaded the WhatSize program, but it doesn't make much sense to me. Have I truly used more than 54BG of space with iTunes and I just don't know it or do I have a bunch of files saved somewhere that I don't know about?
Yes, I've backed up my music library onto an external drive so I'm not really worried about losing my music.
TIA for any and all help you pros can provide.
 
If you've used 54 GB just with iTunes, once you take into account actual HD capacity plus the space required for the OS, you'd have one almost full drive.
 
How are you storing your music files? If you are using the Apple Lossless then you are using a tremendous amount of space. This is really high quality. I personally use the AAC encoder, and I found that reduces the size significantly, and I still have good quality. I don't remember the exact numbers, but once I changed the encoding, approx 30GB of my music went to somewhere between 5 to 10GB of space. Check your iTunes preferences, Advanced tab and see how you are importing. The encoding can be changed on the fly if this is your issue.
 
littlemissGTO said:
I've downloaded the WhatSize program, but it doesn't make much sense to me. Have I truly used more than 54BG of space with iTunes and I just don't know it or do I have a bunch of files saved somewhere that I don't know about?
Click to expand...
I don't know if you'll have any more luck with this app than you did WhatSize, but it does an OK job of visually showing you where your disk space is being used:
http://www.derlien.com/
 
As you now realize, an 80GB drive is actually about 74GB ("GB" to a hard drive manufacturer is 1000 x 1000 x 1000 bytes, but to a computer, it's 1024 x 1024 X 1024 bytes, so 80 "manufacturer" GB ~= 74 "computer" GB).

Take away the almost 20GB the Mac shipped with (OS X + iLife + other misc apps), and you've used up almost all of your free space. If you search for files using up a lot of room, iDVD and GarageBand - and especially their support files - will probably turn out to be the culprits (aside from iTunes).
 
mac-convert said:
How are you storing your music files? If you are using the Apple Lossless then you are using a tremendous amount of space. This is really high quality. I personally use the AAC encoder, and I found that reduces the size significantly, and I still have good quality. I don't remember the exact numbers, but once I changed the encoding, approx 30GB of my music went to somewhere between 5 to 10GB of space. Check your iTunes preferences, Advanced tab and see how you are importing. The encoding can be changed on the fly if this is your issue.
Click to expand...

I've got it set for the MP3 encoder.
Looks like I might have to find a larger HD and take apart my first laptop...lol
 
Respectfully speaking, you don't have an PB, you have an expensive iPod. By my calculations, that works out to somewhere between 600 to 800 CD's, based on 15 to 20 songs per. Sounds like, yes - either an upgrade on your hard drive, or some judicious pruning of your music! Good luck, either way!
 
mac-convert said:
Respectfully speaking, you don't have an PB, you have an expensive iPod. By my calculations, that works out to somewhere between 600 to 800 CD's, based on 15 to 20 songs per. Sounds like, yes - either an upgrade on your hard drive, or some judicious pruning of your music! Good luck, either way!
Click to expand...

At this point you are correct. I haven't gotten much into the computer gaming aspect of things (PS2 and PSP take care of that for now).
At the moment I'm backing up my library again and I'm going to decide what stays and what goes shortly after all is done.
A new hard drive is in my very near future. I've gotta take advantage of what my machine is capable of and keep my music. :)
 
You are definitely a candidate for a larger hard drive. In the meantime you can recover several GB's of space by deleting the iLife applications you do not use (they are on the disks that came with the computer so you can put they back when you have more space), unnecessary printer drivers and languages you do not speak (you can use monolingual for this but DO NOT remove any architectures).

You can also try converting some of your MP3's to AAC (128 bit). If you find the quality acceptable (there is some loss in the process) you can convert your whole collection.

This is just a stop gap measure. You need a bigger drive. Best wishes.
 
emptyCup said:
You are definitely a candidate for a larger hard drive. In the meantime you can recover several GB's of space by deleting the iLife applications you do not use (they are on the disks that came with the computer so you can put they back when you have more space), unnecessary printer drivers and languages you do not speak (you can use monolingual for this but DO NOT remove any architectures).

You can also try converting some of your MP3's to AAC (128 bit). If you find the quality acceptable (there is some loss in the process) you can convert your whole collection.

This is just a stop gap measure. You need a bigger drive. Best wishes.
Click to expand...
At the moment I really don't want to lose any more sound quality that what I have by going digital. (I'm a bit of a budding audiophile). I'll start searching newegg and see if I can't find something to replace what I've got.
 
littlemissGTO said:
At the moment I really don't want to lose any more sound quality that what I have by going digital. (I'm a bit of a budding audiophile). I'll start searching newegg and see if I can't find something to replace what I've got.
Click to expand...

Just a mo.
The files are all digital... whether they are AAC, lossless or MP3.

Converting MP3 to AAC may (or may not) make them smaller, but it can only lose quality by putting a second compression on top of the first. The lossy compression damage has already been done when they were made MP3, and you stand to do more damage by recompressing in AAC.

If you want to make them AAC (which you might) then re-rip from the original CDs.
 
I'm in the proceess of doing that now. Once I've got my music backed up I'm going to delete a bunch of it off the laptop until I buy a bigger HD.
 
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