"Space Available" info fluctuating randomly?

C

coolio2654

Registered
This has been getting on my nerves for quite some time. Here's the story, I'm doing whatever on my comp, when I suddenly get the pop-up when your HDD is almost full. So I proceed to delete a few things. Now I have 4 gigs left. Eventually this happens again, and now this cycle just repeated 3 times already. It's starting to freak me out, because I checked my activity monitor (though 'm no expert) and see no suspicious process, and I was never doing any downloading or anything except internet cruising. So what's up? At this very moment, I'm looking at my finder window and find 3 extra megabytes just disappeared :(. I mean, I don't think my comp is deleting itself, cause everything still works really fine (except Safari, which is really slow now, and Firefox isn't). I'm forwarding my thanks to really needed and appreciated answers, I got 5 years of precious cargo on my mac, and just in the process of backing up :p.
 
You are supposed to have at least 10-15% free HD space for optimal performance along with virtual memory storage, caching, etc. The long and short of it is clearing up 3-4GB here and there is not going to do much or even get above the 10-15% free space threshold. Most software updates are even around 1GB or more. So get a bigger HD, transfer a bunch of stuff to an external, or live with it I guess?
 
The fluctuating is because of the virtual memory and caches.
When you use any application, it uses both.

That is one of the reasons why you should have at least 15 % of your hard drive size free for the system.
The other reasons include the system maintenance: Mac OS X extended journaled, HFS+, the default filesystem for Mac OS X, is to a large extent self healing, and will repair problems when they occur. That's why there's usually no need for much maintenance on Macs (no defrag etc). But it's just like cleaning an apartment: when you have 97 % of your apartment completely full, it's very hard to do any cleaning when you can't move any furniture or any junk. With 97 % of the apartment full, there's no way of moving that grand piano or a king size bed to clean under them even with serious tetris skills. And when you need to get to that seasonal item on the storage, it will take long time to tetris yourself to where it's located. The same with a hard drive: when there's sufficient space for the system to clean it, there's less junk around, and the stuff on your HD is found as fast as it should be.

So clear space on your hard drive. Not jut 1 GB but to have at least 15 % of the HD free. 100 GB HD -> 15+ GB free, 200 GB -> 30+ GB free etc.

Get an external hard drive if necessary. You don't need to have all the files with you at all times, or if you absolutely do, replace the hard drive to a larger one, and use the old hard drive as an additional portable hard drive (cases are cheap).
 
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