Hard Drive Full but what from?

P

pfew0k

Registered
I just got a new MacBook, the 60gig one. I loaded on 20 gigs of music from another machine as well as about 5gigs of software and OS X takes up about 4gigs from what it looks like. Total of say 30-35gigs but it shows that my hard drive is already full. When I first opened it and took a peak at the harddrive i noticed that 20gigs were already full and it was just pre-installed. When I get info on the music folder it says it has 35 gigs but the actual folder my music is in only reads 19.8 gigs. There isn't another folder in the entire thing though. Where did all of my space go? Is there a utility I can use to see maybe a list of files on my harddrive and the size of each? Or is this a common issue with a simple resolution?

Thanks in advance.
 
well, my old Powerbook G3 did that to me and it said i had only 20 mb free when i knew i had like 1 gb. same thing with my friend and his eMac. also, my Powerbook G4 now came with a 80 gb hard drive but i only have 70 ish gbs. ALSO at my old school, my school profile showed me having 1gb but i only had 100-200 mb of data on it. something was wrong and we had to trash the whole profile. i dont know wat to say. go to apple.com and search their utility downloads.
 
Well there's something funky going on with your music folder. I would delete it and then see what the disk space does. If it drops dramatically, then add the music back a little at a time.

Also, the OS uses hard drive space as virtual memory. This can take up a lot of space or very little... it depends on how you use the machine. If you have less than 1GB of RAM, you might consider adding more.
 
Your 60 GB hard drive isn't really 60 GB. Hard drive manufacturers don't use the correct numbers when talking about GB. They say 1 GB is 1000 MB but it's really 1024 MB. So you'll really have 58 GB. When the drive is formatted you will lose about 5-10% which is taken up by the file system information.

So you may be starting with about 50GB in reality. My 120 GB drive only actually has 111.65 GB and my 250 has 233.62 GB.

That might clear up some of your problems as you say you had 20 GB of space taken up when you got it. Really you may have only had 10 GB of actual data and the rest is due to the above reasons.

You can run the program called WhatSize which scans your hard drive and totals the sizes of every folder so you can see what's taking up the space.
 
MacGizmo said:
Well there's something funky going on with your music folder. I would delete it and then see what the disk space does. If it drops dramatically, then add the music back a little at a time.

Also, the OS uses hard drive space as virtual memory. This can take up a lot of space or very little... it depends on how you use the machine. If you have less than 1GB of RAM, you might consider adding more.
Click to expand...

I definitely need to upgrade my RAM to 2gb if possible, I can notice the difference. However, when I restart the virtual memory should be cleared but it only actually clears about 500mb after some seriously intense usage. On deleting the Music folder, what would I do to get it back? Would that screw up my profile at all? First time Mac owner so I'm still learning the system through and through.

Captain Code said:
Your 60 GB hard drive isn't really 60 GB. Hard drive manufacturers don't use the correct numbers when talking about GB. They say 1 GB is 1000 MB but it's really 1024 MB. So you'll really have 58 GB. When the drive is formatted you will lose about 5-10% which is taken up by the file system information.

So you may be starting with about 50GB in reality. My 120 GB drive only actually has 111.65 GB and my 250 has 233.62 GB.

That might clear up some of your problems as you say you had 20 GB of space taken up when you got it. Really you may have only had 10 GB of actual data and the rest is due to the above reasons.

You can run the program called WhatSize which scans your hard drive and totals the sizes of every folder so you can see what's taking up the space.
Click to expand...

I ran WhatSize and an interesting thing popped up. I used Senuti to extract a bunch of music from a friend and I had it auto-transfer after the rip to my iTunes library. Now, when WhatSize runs, it shows those duplicate folders of the original ripping location ~/Music/ as still existing though upon opening the folder I can not see them there. How can I view the hidden folders and erase them?

Thanks again guys,
pfe
 
You can delete it within WhatSize by selecting the duplicate folders and clicking the Delete button. It'll move it to the Trash and then you can empty the trash.
 
Okay so the duplicates didn't show up in the folder but they did in the terminal so I just rm -rd'd those suckers and BAM 15gigs back in my possession. Thanks for the suggestions guys and especially that WhatSize program, highly useful.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top