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How full is your hard drive?

gorskiegangsta

gorskiegangsta

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Mar 13, 2011
1,281
87
Brooklyn, NY
Hey there. I'm interested, how much do people fill up their MBP hard drives? What is taking up most space on your hard drive (documents, music, photos, software, videos)? Also, what is the absolute minimum capacity you'll be able to live with? I, personally, can't have a hard drive less than 250gb of space.
EDIT: Most of the space on my HDD is taken up by my 85gb music library.

My MBP hard drive usage:
Capacity: 500gb
Free: 292gb
Used: 208gb
 
I don't have a MBP. I did want to make a comment though. I studied computer information systems when I was in college a million years ago and there was one thing that I learned very early on. One textbook which was written by Peter Norton. In it, he said, if you were to ask a large number of computer users which would make more difference as far as a computers performance. One was more RAM, the other was more free space on your hard drive. He said that the less experienced would answer having more RAM, whereas the more experienced users know the answer is to have more free space on your hard drive.
 
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Interesting! I would've thought otherwise; that more experienced users would be concerned with things like RAM and Processors whereas the less experienced would be concerned with storage space. Also, I think more experienced users would nearly always pick a lower capacity SSD over a higher capacity HDD. I know I would. In fact, I am planning on getting a ~250gb SSD soon to replace the 500gb HDD i currently have.
 
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Using about 650 GB out of 750. The biggest factors are:

Financial DBs: 200GB
Movies: 105GB
Virtual Machines: 100GB
Games: 75GB
Applications: 38GB
Pictures: 35GB
Music: 32GB
Dev Tools + Libraries: 30GB

Rest is mainly documents.
 
500GB drive.
130GB free.

Mostly Logic and content, Pro Tools, and various audio libraries including a large amount of Toontrack drum libraries. A pretty large music/mp3 collection as well that probably weighs in at about 100GB.

Time to upgrade to a 750GB soon.

500GB is the bare minimum for me, and the reason I have no interest in SSD at this point in time.
 
Size: 750GB
Used: 359.9GB (Mainly movies, but some games and music there, too)
Free: 389.9GB

Couldn't live with a drive below 320GB. 500GB is preferable, 750GB is a luxury. 1TB would be good, too :p
 
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I've got a 500GB HDD in my MBP, and I've used up 110GB. Most of it is X-Plane, which takes up 90GB, the rest is a pirated season of The Simpsons and a few games.

Only my iMac I've only used up 20GB out of 500GB because its fairly new and there is virtually nothing on there except a few applications and text documents.

On my 250GB external HD there is 28GB used, all of which is backups of some things on my MBP and iMac.
 
500 GB capacity
Used: 200 GB

Includes music, documents and projects from grad and undergrad. I also run bootcamp off my MBP that includes .NET, Oracle 11g, SQL server, and ETL tools

I store movies and other large files on a separate HD
 
This...
Movies and music take up about 150GB and on Bootcamp just Steam games and Scottradelite.
 

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Stock 320 GB HDD
242 GB free

This is mainly because I just have my favorite music, iphone apps, and documents on this machine.

Nonetheless, I do have 2 external HDDs

Size 1.5 TB
Free 100 GB

Size: 2 TB
Free: 1.3 TB

With pics getting bigger and bigger in size, getting External HDD is a no brainer. So a piece of advise, never use more than 50% off your main HDD, store non daily info on externals.
 
capacity: 80GB
used: 17.89 GB
free: 61.8 GB

I wanted a 64GB SSD but I went with intel x25m where the smallest was 80 GB.
 
adnoh said:
capacity: 80GB
used: 17.89 GB
free: 61.8 GB

I wanted a 64GB SSD but I went with intel x25m where the smallest was 80 GB.
Click to expand...

Capacity : two 500GB
HD 1 : used 440GB .... Free 24GB
HD 2 : used 346GB .... Free 119GB

Where is 1TB 7200 rpm drive? I want one....
 
I used to have 160 GB hard drive because I figured I could get a 1 TB external hard drive and store photos, movies, etc. on there and I would only really want 160 GB with me. But I kept needing to delete programs and files, so I upgraded to 320 GB. Since then, I've hovered around 180 GB of used space :rolleyes:. But it's nice to not have to manage it.

Most of my space is taken up by music and photos. I also tend to keep any program I've ever used installed, so there's some of that too.
 
3.5TB used out of 6.5TB capacity on my Mac mini server.

That keeps my other Macs light. None are using more than half of their capacity and most are considerably less.
 
I am very very light.

Capacity 80GB
Available 42GB
Used 37GB

I use 15GB for Dropbox and the rest for OSX and its applications.
My music and pictures are on Spotify and Flickr.
My movies on an external drive.
 
LarryC said:
I don't have a MBP. I did want to make a comment though. I studied computer information systems when I was in college a million years ago and there was one thing that I learned very early on. One textbook which was written by Peter Norton. In it, he said, if you were to ask a large number of computer users which would make more difference as far as a computers performance. One was more RAM, the other was more free space on your hard drive. He said that the less experienced would answer having more RAM, whereas the more experienced users know the answer is to have more free space on your hard drive.
Click to expand...


Thats a horrible response.

NOTHING improves system performance more than adding memory IF you are running out of memory and paging. On the other hand, adding more memory when it is not needed will yield little or no performance improvement.

By the way, I remember reading Peter Norton books in 1986, about MS-DOS. Please tell me thats not the time frame that you are referencing.
 
Penn Jennings said:
NOTHING improves system performance more than adding memory IF you are running out of memory and paging. On the other hand, adding more memory when it is not needed will yield little or no performance improvement.
Click to expand...

You are just looking at memory. You need to consider disk capacity --
having more free space on the disk drive always improves performance and if you run out of disk space everything stops (rather than slows down), so Peter Norton's advice still holds true.
 
talmy said:
You are just looking at memory. You need to consider disk capacity --
having more free space on the disk drive always improves performance and if you run out of disk space everything stops (rather than slows down), so Peter Norton's advice still holds true.
Click to expand...

Having more disk space does NOT always improve performance. If you have a 500 GB drive. Having 400 GB free or 250 GB free if not likely to make any real difference on performance. Where you data is located on the drive might make a difference if the drive is mechanical. On a good SSD, you shouldn't notice a difference.


The discussion was about having more disk space, the discussion really makes no sense if you don't have enough to even store your data in the first place. You can't talk about performance on data or an application that you don't have because you don't have the space. :)
 
Penn Jennings said:
Thats a horrible response.

NOTHING improves system performance more than adding memory IF you are running out of memory and paging. On the other hand, adding more memory when it is not needed will yield little or no performance improvement.

By the way, I remember reading Peter Norton books in 1986, about MS-DOS. Please tell me thats not the time frame that you are referencing.
Click to expand...

Adding more RAM doesn't improve system performance beyond being able to run more tasks at once. A faster and/or more capacious hard drive, on the other hand, will improve system performance speed wise.

EDIT: Let me clarify; a more capacious hard drive improves system performance in the sense that you'll be able to write more data to it before performance will start to degrade.
 
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