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When does HD space start to slow your computer down
- Thread starter ceezy3000
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Tallest Skil
macrumors P6
It came with 215 because hard drive manufacturers lie to you, but that's beside the point.
You want to keep around 10GB free. You shouldn't see any measurable slowdown until around 30GB free.
You want to keep around 10GB free. You shouldn't see any measurable slowdown until around 30GB free.
IJ Reilly
macrumors P6
It also came with 215 GB free because the drive wasn't empty, and you shouldn't see any measurable slowdown below 3-4 GB free unless you never reboot.
doubleohseven
macrumors 6502a
I've got around 20GB left on my 80GB (74GB) HDD on my MacBook. I used to maintain it so that it would always have no less than 40GB of space left, but it somehow went a little overboard. 😱 I've noticed that my MacBook can be a little unresponsive at times (a.k.a the appearance of the colourful pinwheel), so be good and maintain your HDD.
The OS makers (all of them) are the ones who are lying, the hard drive manufacturers are simply adhering to unit prefix standards, because it benefits them. Unfortunately, noone else is doing that, so they turn out as the bad guys.
As for your question - it's not really just about the amount of free space. The hard drive is needed and used, when your computer runs out of free RAM and uses the HDD as memory. As this happens, you will immediately notice a slowdown, even if you have a very fast drive and lots of free space, so the amount of RAM you have and use is very important. The next thing is the fragmentation of your drive. If it's very fragmented, it may work slower, even if there is enough free space. All in all - with a couple of gigabytes free you probably won't have any problems.
As I said - any slowdowns you notice would probably happen because of the fact virtual memory (memory on the hard drive) is being used, not because of the lack of hard drive space.
IJ Reilly
macrumors P6
Exactly. You should only encounter slowdown problems due to a lack of hard drive space if OSX tries to borrow space on the drive that you don't have for virtual memory. Unless you fail to reboot occasionally, a few gigabytes of free space should be enough.
I've had 5-6GB free on my hard drive for the past week, (approx). No slowdown though, probaly due to my 4GB of RAM 🙂
IJ Reilly
macrumors P6
Right, a healthy amount of RAM means OSX isn't going to have to borrow as much drive space for virtual memory, or as often.
Tough to say
I hate to admit it, but from reading other threads and from experience it seems as though you have to do the old Windows Trick... Back up everything and reinstall the OS. Pain in the butt, but I have yet to use any kind of software like Onyx etc. that has been able bring about the same benefits. I am all ears though because it would be nice to not have to do it again... I have a MBP 2007 (July) 2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 667 Mhz DDR2 SDRam running 10.5.6, with a 320 GB HD x 5400 Rpm.... and I swear I just can't get to run like the day it came out of the box... :-( I have about 40 GB left of free space. There is also a WinXP partition via Bootcamp I use on rare occasion. Is boot camp slowing down the boot up sequence even when not in use? Seems to work just fine after its 1:40 mins boot up.... roughly 1:40 is when I can start using Apps- after running Onyx and removing Symantec.
Any ideas?
I hate to admit it, but from reading other threads and from experience it seems as though you have to do the old Windows Trick... Back up everything and reinstall the OS. Pain in the butt, but I have yet to use any kind of software like Onyx etc. that has been able bring about the same benefits. I am all ears though because it would be nice to not have to do it again... I have a MBP 2007 (July) 2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 667 Mhz DDR2 SDRam running 10.5.6, with a 320 GB HD x 5400 Rpm.... and I swear I just can't get to run like the day it came out of the box... :-( I have about 40 GB left of free space. There is also a WinXP partition via Bootcamp I use on rare occasion. Is boot camp slowing down the boot up sequence even when not in use? Seems to work just fine after its 1:40 mins boot up.... roughly 1:40 is when I can start using Apps- after running Onyx and removing Symantec.
Any ideas?