Losing Hard Drive Space

[zerodfg]

Hi,

I have an Apple Macbook from late 2006 that is running Leopard. My hard drive space has been disappearing for no apparent reason. I noticed the biggest jump this morning. Last night I had 9GB left on my Hard Drive. Now I have 3.7GB left. Can anyone explain why this is going on and/or how i could fix it?

I restarted my computer and i now have 6GB left. But i want to know where that other 3GB went.

 

[flatfoot]

Hm, the OS writes a whole lot of temporary files while it is running; but I don't know whether that's several gigabytes. And you should get that space back when rebooting... *shrug*

BUT: You should definitely get a bigger hard drive. If you replace your 80GB with a, say 250GB one, you will see a real performace gain, since the fuller the HD, the harder it gets for the OS to find big enough chunks to write things without fragmentation (and newer/bigger HDs are faster [higher density]). And fragmentation slows everything down. If the drive is big enough, OSX takes care that there is not too much fragmentation.
And really weird things happen when your drive is full to the last MB. I accidentally experienced that last year with my MacBook...