SSD Free Space - How Much Does My MBA Have?

[Buadhai]

I just got an M1 MBA with a 256GB SSD. I'm trying to figure out how much free space the SSD has. I get very different answers depending on where I look.

The Stats menu bar items says 82% is used leaving 18% free or about 46GB free.
The Finder says 121.87 GB available.
Disk Utility says 43.75 GB Free.
The Storage section of System Settings>General says 122.7 GB.
On the command line, DF also says 18% (46GB) available

Which one is closest to being approximately correct?

 

[DarkPremiumCho]

The Storage section would be the closest one. Others do or do not count APFS snapshots, system volumes, system partitions, purgeable content, etc so they report differently.

 

[Buadhai]

The Storage section would be the closest one. Others do or do not count APFS snapshots, system volumes, system partitions, purgeable content, etc so they report differently.

Thanks. It's amazing to me that there's such a huge discrepancy with no hint as to why or what is or is not being taken in to account.

Perhaps I'll write a little piece of code that keeps incrementing a file until it fails due to lack of space.

Or, not.

 

[rpmurray]

Where did all that free space go on my APFS disk?

 

[Buadhai]

Where did all that free space go on my APFS disk?

As usual he does a great job of explaining things in thorough but easily understood manner.

 

[Buadhai]

The Eclectic Light Company has Mints, a free multipurpose utility. Here are the Mints results for Volume Info on my boot drive:

Volume <Macintosh HD>:
    format APFS (NOT case sensitive)
    free space on </Volumes/Macintosh HD> is 42.65 GB of total 245.11 GB
    used space 202.45 GB
    available for important usage 159.98 GB
    available for opportunistic usage 30.3 GB
    sparse file storage available
    file cloning available
    volume supports compression.

Edit: After posting the above I checked again with the Finder. It now says 175GB available.

 

[Buadhai]

This afternoon Stats reports that the SSD is only 39% full. Quite a change from yesterday's 82%. Have I deleted anything? No.

 

[Feek]

DaisyDisk generally agrees with the figure in Storage for me.

 

[Fishrrman]

I've never relied on what the "storage" tab tells me.

If I want to know how much "free space" is on a drive -- ANY drive -- I just select it in the finder, then type command-i to summon up the "get info" box.

The amount of space shown in "available" is good enough for me:

(the above is from a partition on the boot SSD, because my boot SSD [512gb] is split into 4 partitions...)