Hard drive slowly losing space??? Is this normal?

[mannaRose]

Hi everyone,

I'm running an intel Imac 2.16ghz c2d with 3 gigs memory and 250 gig hard drive. Here's how it started. I was surfing on the Flock browser one day, and then all of a sudden, my hard drive space was full! I wasn't downloading anything. I checked my log folder in the library and lo and behold, there was almost 2 gigs stored in the console folder! What?!?! Anyway, I cleaned it out and my Mac is now under routine maintenance via OnyX. I also use virus barrier x5 and nothing is wrong with my Mac. I also run disk inventory x and run activity monitor.

Now, I got my hard drive space back at 200.37 gigs. But sometimes when I reboot, my hard drive shows it at 200.48, then as time goes by while I surf, it slowly decreases to 200.27 gigs, then it will slowly go back up to 200.37 gigs, and so forth. I'm not downloading anything, just surfing. Has this happened to you guys before? Is the virtual memory causing this? Are there any cure for this besides formatting the hd again? What's going on? Thanks for the help, guys.

Byron

 

[iBookG4user]

I do believe that when your computer has no RAM available it starts to use the hard drive as RAM and thus the available disk space would go down.

 

[mannaRose]

I do believe that when your computer has no RAM available it starts to use the hard drive as RAM and thus the available disk space would go down.

Thanks, iBookG4user. I shouldn't have this problem, though. My activity monitor shows that 2.15 gigs of memory are still left