How Much HD Space does Snow Leopard save??

[jbrown]

I went from having 16gig free before installing, to 33gig!!!!

Can this be right??

 

[brendu]

yeah in some very non technical terms, SL actually opens up alot of HDD space that was not even shown as available in Leo. On a 320Gig HDD under LEO it said I had 300 Gigs with some used and some available, under SL it says i have 320 Gigs with some used and some available.. A more techy guy will be able to tell you exacatly why but yes, that is quite possible, and probable.

 

[stainlessliquid]

No, Leopard is only 12gbs from a clean install without bloat like printer drivers and languages. I dont remember how much space SL took up when I installed it since I forgot to look after I installed a few things but Im guessing it was around 10 or 11gbs. It was not very much less than 12gbs.

Snow Leopard reads the size of HDD's differently than Leopard does, you are not actually gaining extra space, bytes are just calculated using a different formula.

 

[Hellhammer]

yeah in some very non technical terms, SL actually opens up alot of HDD space that was not even shown as available in Leo. On a 320Gig HDD under LEO it said I had 300 Gigs with some used and some available, under SL it says i have 320 Gigs with some used and some available.. A more techy guy will be able to tell you exacatly why but yes, that is quite possible, and probable.

That's because Leopard sees GB as 1024MB and Snow Leopard sees it as 1000MB. That doesn't free up space but because SL is basically rewrote Leopard, Apple got rid of useless files and made existing ones smaller. I got about 7GB more free space after installing SL

 

[mrboult]

Yes It is very possible with a large HD that is near full. I went from 12GB free to 22GB free on a 160GB Drive.

A lot of people are saying that this is because of the way SnowLeopard now calculates a GB but the difference is not that extreme.

Quite simply . . .

A Leopard GB is 1024MB
A SnowLeopard GB is 1000MB

My Free space in Leopard was: 12 x 1024MB = 12,288MB

My Free space in SnowLeopard is: 22 x 1000MB = 22,000MB

The difference of free space between the two installs is:
22,000MB - 12,288MB = 9,712MB

THE POINT is that the 24MB per GB difference is not the reason people are seeing all this new free space.

Part of the reason is the smaller footprint of SnowLeopard. And in part due to Snowleopard's new file compression system.

 

[Etnies419]

THE POINT is that the 24MB per GB difference is not the reason people are seeing all this new free space.

I don't think anyone is saying that. Pretty much everyone knows that Snow Leopard frees up some space (about 7 GB). However, what people are saying is that Snow Leopard is not freeing up as much space as it appears it is, because of how it calculates the space.

 

[gr8tfly]

Actual number of bytes saved on my early 2009 17" ubMBP: 11.2GB (1000 bytes/k)

 

[jbrown]

THANKS FOR THE REPLIES - INTERESTING TOPIC!

So in the real world, have I saved approx 7 gig?

So before = 16gb
plus 7gb
Equals 23gb new realworld space?

But it is telling me 33gb - so for theoretical debate - if I tried to copy a file larger than 23gb, it wouldn't fit?

 

[gr8tfly]

THANKS FOR THE REPLIES - INTERESTING TOPIC!

So in the real world, have I saved approx 7 gig?

So before = 16gb
plus 7gb
Equals 23gb new realworld space?

But it is telling me 33gb - so for theoretical debate - if I tried to copy a file larger than 23gb, it wouldn't fit?

Yes, it would fit. There's nothing "hidden" in the free space shown. If it says 33GB free, then that's what you have free.

If you showed 16GB free, while booted in 10.5, you actually had 17.18GB free. So, 17.18+7=24.18GB.

BUT - you saved more than 7GB if the system is showing 33GB free. It looks like you saved 33-17.18 GB, or 16.18GB. That seems high - the most I can recall seeing reported saved is around 13GB. In any event, whatever it's showing you now is the real number of bytes free - meaning you theoretically can copy a file up to 33GB in size onto the drive.