My Rant on OS X and Hard Drive Space!

[thejadedmonkey]

There's something about a mac that causes it to eat up disk space. I got my mini right when it came out, with the 40 gig hard drive. I ran out of space, but it was OK because I knew it would happen eventually and I just got 100 gig hard drive. That was this last fall. In the past 7 or so months, I've managed to add 60 gigs to my collection of crap. I've added 8 gigs worth of music, a few pictures, and I guess a bunch of ripped DVDs.

About a week ago, I started getting worried because the system kept telling me I was running out of space, but I didn't really mind. I still had 1.16 gigs left, and the computer had been on for a few weeks, so I knew it had all the virtual memory it needed. Well, I installed Quicksilver tonight. Now I'm down to 202 megs of space. Quicksilver is 7.2 megabytes, which is nowhere near a gig that I lost during the install.

My hard drive space just seems to go away. It gets eaten up by OS X, and I have nowhere left to go. I can't buy a larger hard drive either!

7.4 gigs of Applications
7.2 gigs in a back up folder
3 gigs of documents
3.3 gigs of pics
24 gigs worth of ripped DVD's
5 gigs in Library (user and system)
1 gig system info
28 gigs of music

= 78.9 (roughly)
I should have 90 or so (once it's formatted and loses a bit of space) so where did the 11.1 gigs disappear to, and why do I only have 189.2 megs of free space (it went down while I was typing this)?

My virtual memory size is 4.9 gigs. My trashcan is 4 gigs, so that's some of the 11.1 gigs... and I understand I should only have a few gigs left, but instead I'm down to megs, and I don't know why!

THIS IS SO ANNOYING! NO WONDER NEW iMACS COME WITH 250 GIG HARD DRIVES!!!!!!

 

[Mernak]

try using WhatSize(too lazy to link, just google it). the drivers and languages take up a lot of room too(use monolingual for the lang). as for the 4 gigs in the trash, why dont you just empty it?

 

[~Shard~]

I'm not lazy.

Yes, try WhatSize for starters to accurately assess exactly what is taking up space on your HDD and how much of it.

Also, never run OS X with less than 8 GB (or so) of HDD space free. Running it with only 1 GB free will not result in a happy Mac.

Run WhatSize, decide what can be culled, and go from there. You may also want to remove all of the extra (useless) language packs, GarageBand (if you don't use it), iDVD themes, etc... Then look at your iTunes library for duplicates, and make sure you don't have copies of your songs in both your iTunes library and elsewhere on your HDD. Same goes for iPhoto - use a tool like iPhotoDiet (except one which will work with iPhoto 6) to make sure your library is in order.

 

[redAPPLE]

there is this app that does a good job of cleaning up your system (doing cron jobs and stuff). it has been recommended in this site. but i can't remember its name right now.

 

[quigleybc]

I think what he's trying to say is that, even though he has accounted for everything size wize, there is still missing gigs of info...

Happens to me too, I'll use whatsize, or omni discsweeper, and account for everything, but my space will still go down by sometimes up to 3 gigs!

I'll restart, or wait for a day, and it will be back to the amount that it should be at....


Is that virtual memory? 3 gigs worth?

 

[mkrishnan]

I'll restart, or wait for a day, and it will be back to the amount that it should be at....

Over the course of my Mac being booted for a month or so, the free HD space will inexplicably shrink by 1.5-2GB, which are magically restored upon reboot. Some people have said this is VM Swap, but I thought that the system was set up so that the VM and the Trashcan were not counted in the free space calculation in Finder? Is this true or not?

 

[MacAficionado]

Isn't this the saqme with every hard drive in any platform. Formatting, wether DOS, HFS, NTFS takes space, so a 40GB hard drive, will have less space when formatted. That is just how it is!

 

[floyde]

Isn't this the saqme with every hard drive in any platform. Formatting, wether DOS, HFS, NTFS takes space, so a 40GB hard drive, will have less space when formatted. That is just how it is!

Very true. Also, hard drive manufacturers calculate disk space using 1000MB = 1GB, when in reality 1GB = 1024MB.

 

[mkrishnan]

Isn't this the saqme with every hard drive in any platform. Formatting, wether DOS, HFS, NTFS takes space, so a 40GB hard drive, will have less space when formatted. That is just how it is!

This is true, but the formatted capacity of a 100GB HD is about 93 gigs, in line with what the OP said when he already took this issue into account.