Macbook hard drive half full on day 2 of use?!

[benfilan]

Hi, just got a new Macbook on wednesday, the only things i've installed is messenger, i;ve transferred my music library which is 14 gb, but my 80gb hard drive is saying theres only 40gb remaining. surely this muct be a mistake? is there any way to check whats taking up the most room?

 

[killmoms]

Standard OS X + iLife + goodies install comes to around 10GB as I recall (most of that from languages, printer drivers, GarageBand loops and iDVD/iMovie templates). Your 80GB hard drive has about 74GB of actual space, so that's down to 64 when you open the box. Plus your music library of 14GB, now you're down to 50. That last ten gigs is a bit confusing, unless you put on other documents as well. Maybe a runaway log file?

 

[Felldownthewell]

Well, first of all the drive dosen't have 80gb of REAL WORLD capacity. My 100gb grive has about 92gb total space, even with nothing on it. Second, the OS takes up quite a bit of room, and iLife takes up several gigs as well. Those things, plus the 14gb of music accounts for the missing space.

What you can do is if you find that you aren't using iLife programs, you can delete them. I got rid of garageband, iDVD, and iMovie it gave me like 7-10gb back. I may be a few off, I haven't done it in a while.

EDIT: Beaten to the punch by killmoms

 

[Canerican]

Hi, just got a new Macbook on wednesday, the only things i've installed is messenger, i;ve transferred my music library which is 14 gb, but my 80gb hard drive is saying theres only 40gb remaining. surely this muct be a mistake? is there any way to check whats taking up the most room?

Sounds about right. When you get the MB it comes with the preinstalled software which is about 25GB. I delete GarageBand and programs that are only demos and that frees up about 10GB. I would get an external HDD if I were you... 14GB of music is alot and you should always keep your HDD less than 85% full in order to keep it running well.

To check whats taking up most room is a fairly work heavy task... ctrl + click a folder or application and it tells you how large the folder/application is.

 

[joshwest]

yeah it sucks my 160 gb in my C2D MBP is really 148gb

 

[killmoms]

yeah it sucks my 160 gb in my C2D MBP is really 148gb

Well, just to clarify for those who don't know, that's because hard drive manufacturers measure a gigabyte as a billion bytes, in decimal.

However, that's not how data is stored. In reality, it's actually 1024^3 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes, since it's binary (powers of 2, in this case 2^30). If you divide 160,000,000,000 (the number of bytes in a 160GB hard drive) by the actual size of a binary gigabyte, that comes out to 149 and (very little) change.

This is basically so hard drive manufacturers can make the hard drive sound bigger than it actually is. Yay marketing!

 

[Unspeaked]

1. Open a Finder window in list view.

2. Go to View Options and make sure "Calculate Folder Sizes" is checked.

3. Run through your HD from the top down to see if any folder is suspiciously large.

At the very least, you'll see what's taking up all your space, and maybe you'll luck out and it'll be some stuff you don't need and can trash.

 

[jeremy.king]

Hi, just got a new Macbook on wednesday, the only things i've installed is messenger, i;ve transferred my music library which is 14 gb, but my 80gb hard drive is saying theres only 40gb remaining. surely this muct be a mistake? is there any way to check whats taking up the most room?

Use whatsize to find the offending space hogs.

 

[benfilan]

you rock!

thanks guys, you're all rockstars. I knew 80gb didnt mean a literal 80gb of space, but i thought it was a bit wierd. i actually used onyx and got it down to 43gb free. woo. thanks again!

 

[ChrisA]

Hi, just got a new Macbook on wednesday, the only things i've installed is messenger, i;ve transferred my music library which is 14 gb, but my 80gb hard drive is saying theres only 40gb remaining. surely this muct be a mistake? is there any way to check whats taking up the most room?

Open up a terminal window. The "du" command is "disk usage" you can get a report of the size of things in a folder sorted by size. if you type

cd /
du -s * | sort -n

The biggest folders will be listed on the bottom of the screen. Do a "cd" into these and then another "du" (you can recal the du command using the up arrow key. Sorting by size let's you ignore the stuff that doesn't matter

If you simply type "df" (no quotes) you will get a nice report of the size of each disk partition and the data in each.

I started using computers long before there were mice and graphic, sometimes typing is faster. and it is certainly faster than hunting down some specialized program.

My gues is that it's about right. The biggest thing you have is the music library.
Maybe in ayear you spend $100 and buy a 160GB disk drive.

 

[~Shard~]

Here are my recommendations for freeing up HDD space:

- remove GarageBand and iDVD if you do not need them - that should free up around 6 GB right there
- check out /Library/Printers/ - 2 GB of printer drivers that you may or may not need
- use OmniDiskSweeper (not free) or my personal favorite WhatSize (free) to determine what all is taking up room on your HDD and where it is
- use Monolingual to remove the unnecessary language resources from your Mac (note - do NOT delete the Architectures if you are using an Intel machine or else Rosetta and other things will not work!)
- lastly, you could always use AppZapper to ensure that when you uninstall any programs that all those pesky sub-folders, etc. are deleted

That should just about do it.

 

[disconap]

At that point, I would personally just do a re-install of OSX set to minimal personal specs (I usually just install the OS, the HP print drivers, developers tools, and X11; works out to around 1g in Panther and I think 1.5-2 in Tiger, can't remember). Then use more efficient open source options instead of ilife.

 

[Kingsly]

Well, just to clarify for those who don't know, that's because hard drive manufacturers measure a gigabyte as a billion bytes, in decimal.

However, that's not how data is stored. In reality, it's actually 1024^3 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes, since it's binary (powers of 2, in this case 2^30). If you divide 160,000,000,000 (the number of bytes in a 160GB hard drive) by the actual size of a binary gigabyte, that comes out to 149 and (very little) change.

This is basically so hard drive manufacturers can make the hard drive sound bigger than it actually is. Yay marketing!

Arrgh, beat me to it.

(At least you saved me some typing. )

 

[fivetoadsloth]

Arrgh, beat me to it.

(At least you saved me some typing. )

lol, same here

 

[Counterfit]

and you should always keep your HDD less than 85% full in order to keep it running well.

I usually go by 10% (even though I'm well under that right now. I need a 160GB drive )

To check whats taking up most room is a fairly work heavy task

Not really.

 

[~Shard~]

lol, same here

Then why bother even posting???