hard drive space and swapfile

[furcalchick]

i've been having a slight problem with my hard drive the past two days, and i want to know how to approach it. before this all started, i had about 41.5 gigs free on my hard drive, now i'm down to 39 gigs, and i've hardly downloaded anything the past two days (like 100 mb of stuff). i just found out there are a bunch of swapfiles in my private folder taking up over 2gb of space which were created just today, and i suspect was the reason why my hard drive was shrinking. also, i've been hearing a few clicks, presumably from the hard drive (not alot of clicking, just here and there), and i'm hoping my hard drive isn't going bad already (this is a nine month old mac). i've backed up my hard drive in the past week, so i won't lose too much if the stuff crashes now, but i'm more worried about these swapfiles, where are they coming from and how to get rid of them. thanks.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Are they still there / still the same size after a restart?

 

[mad jew]

Don't get rid of them. They're simply OSX doing its thing - using the hard drive as virtual memory. You'd get the same thing in Windows, and it's normal.

As for the clicking, that can sometimes be a sign of imminent disk failure (but not always). Use Disk Utility to verify your drive.

 

[furcalchick]

okay it's back to normal

it's back to the 42 gig i had after i restarted. that was weird though.

i'm still learning the mac though...heh heh. i don't know how i would make it without the loving family here at this site.