Did you know that more free space your Hard Drive has the faster it will operate?

Did you know that it should never be over 90% full?

How can you tell if getting a bigger hard drive will help your computer run faster?

Here’s how to see how full your macintosh computer hard disk is and what to do about it.

1. Go to your utilities folder. (Click on your desktop anywhere so that the finder is active.
   Hold down apple-shift-U, this will open your ‘utilities folder.)
2. Open ‘Activity Monitor’
3. Press Apple-1 so that the main window of Utility Monitor is open.
4. Click on the ‘Disk Usage’ tab at the bottom of the window. This will display a little pie graph of how much memory you are currently using.

The little graph on the side shows how much of your disk space is free.

Green is good. Blue is used up.

So in this example I have used a little over one third of my hard drive space.

The more free space you have, the faster your computer will run, although you probably won’t notice the difference until your hard drive starts to get reasonably full. As a rough rule, try to keep at least 10% of your hard drive free.

If your Hard Drive fills right up, you may get an error like ‘your startup disk is full.’ in this case you really do need to do something right away – your computer will be limping along if your drive is totally full.

If your hard drive is too full, you can get an external one, and put some of your big files, like movies, onto it, or you can delete some things that you don’t need, or here is an article on how to tweak a little extra space from your existing Hard Disk.

So your old laptop is running a bit slowly… it might be that the hard drive is too small and all your hard disk space is all used up. Here’s a few different ways to recover some extra Hard Drive space. Basically there are lots of files you can probably get rid of, and here’s now to find them.

You don’t even need to be totally free of space to do this, did you know that you should never fill your hard drive to more than approx 80% capacity or it will slow down performance?

1. Remove all the extra language files to gain a few hundred MB.
OS X comes with almost 50 languages, chances are you only speak one or two. Here’s how to delete the ones you don’t use.
1. Download Monolingual from here
2. Run it and it will remove all the language files you don’t need. It defaults to keeping English, gets rid of Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic etc. (Don’t use the other features of monolingual – just the language removal.)

This will be more useful on an older smaller hard drive, but if you have a drive bigger than 100G you probably won’t even notice an extra few hundred Megabytes.

2. Use Disk Inventory to see where your space is being taken.
You probably have lots of old files lying round you don’t use much, some of them might be very big. This program shows you what is taking the most space.
1. Download Disk Inventory X from here.
2. Run it, go have a cup of coffee – it can take a while.
3. Look at the results, they will be a picture like this:

You can mouse over the colors to see which files they are on the hard drive, and then manually delete the folders to create free space. I found lots of thinks I did not need with this program, like old movies hiding away, folders full of microsoft junk, etc. Don’t delete anything if you don’t know what it is though.

3. Clear out your Library/Application Support folder
Have a look in your Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support folder and there may be some old folders from applications you have deleted but no longer use. You can delete them.

4. Clear out your Printers
This is like the languages, but for printer drovers. OSX comes ready to work with hundreds of printers, chances are you only have one or two. Have a look in Macintosh HD/Library/Printers and delete any folders for printers you don’t need. For example the Epson library contains 1.4Gig of files – yet I don’t even have an Epson printer!

5. Manually delete files
The slow but hard way to make more space! But there is a trick to speed it up. To see how much space a folder takes, go to Menu ‘View/Show View options’ then select the box that says ‘calculate all sizes’. Then sort by folder size by clicking on the size heading in the window. You can now see which folders take the most space.

When you are finished deleting files empty the trash. This deletes them totally from your hard drive and frees up space. While they are in the trash they still take up space. Be careful, there’s no way to get them back after you have deleted the trash!

Movies take up the most space, if you delete them they will free up lots of space.