Mac running slower

How much slower? Can you give an estimate in minutes/seconds?

In my experience, it's unnecessary to shut down the computer--putting it to sleep is fine unless you'll be away for several days.

~Lyssa

How much free space do you have on your HD. Anything less than 10-15% will slow it down.

Hmm. Have you made any changes to the computer (such as more RAM, a new hard drive, etc)?

~Lyssa

Most widely used, lots of archived posts on it, is to clone the drive to an external drive that is more GB than your internal, zero erase the internal, finally reclone back from external to the internal.

Isn't that a little extreme at this point? Why not try an archive and install first?

I would prefer to advise users to spend a small amount of additional money for what has become a relatively inexpensive, larger hard drive, but would they take the advice with the economy tanked....

According to Apple it is not necessary to defrag, and not recommended on a boot drive:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375?viewlocale=en_US
Without knowing more, it's probably most likely that the OP will fail to see even a minor benefit.

Nevertheless, it is an Apple recommended procedure in certain situations, so not at all extreme from that standpoint - refer to the "Using Disk Utility" section:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1553
Simply follow both sets of their " >Instructions" in the section "Using Disk Utility." In between performing the two sets of instructions, to ensure that the hard drive is viable for accurate storage of valuable data, use the zero erase procedure in Disk Utility. This will "map out" unusable sectors.

Unfortunately, an archive and install is not without risk - for example, over-filling the internal hard drive with one or more archived copies is an invitation to corrupted data. How does the average person recover from corrupted data? They come here and ask why their three-year old hard drives are so full and useless (after they've archived three times without deleting).

Having less than 10 % hard drive free will have no affect on the boot speed. In fact, that amount is way over rated even for normal operating, regardless of booting. It is not a functions of the percentage of total drive space. That would make no sense. Rather it is a function of what applications you run. If you are only running a web browser and email client a half a GB is plenty of free space. Having more will show no speed change.

The OP says it used to boot in a few seconds. Not unless you have an SSD instead of a standard hard drive. Perhaps the OP is comparing Waking from Sleep to a Restart.

? They come here and ask why their three-year old hard drives are so full and useless (after they've archived three times without deleting).

I say extreme in this case because this individual obviously has not previously attempted this and therefore will not "fill up" their HD. Plus, I have 3 labs, totaling 60 Macs, and I have yet to see the dire consequences you predict. Plus, why spend any money at all when you haven't explored all possible, simple, remedies.

Sorry Gregory, but your are absolutely wrong.

+why spend any money at all+

Money is worthless - people no longer stoop for change. Not willing to lose my personal data or spend a fortune to retrieve it, I spend a relatively tiny bit of money when I need to back-up. Some never learn:)

macbig wrote:
Sorry Gregory, but your are absolutely wrong.

All of my comments are proven by actual experimentation of filling up the hard drive until there was less than 300MB of free space. I then continued to operate with no measurable loss in speed. This was doing the routine stuff of surfing the internet, the way I do, and having Mail open and it checking the new mail every 5 minutes.

If you have a one terabyte drive would you expect your computer to boot slowly if there were less than 100 gigabytes of free space?

Booting does very little writing to the hard drive and thus needs very little space to write to. Therefore having less than 100 GigaBytes of free space is not gonna make a very large difference in how long it takes to boot.

I'll concur with Gregory--my machine has gone down to less than 700 MB of free space (out of 70 GB on the OS X side) with little difference in performance.

With that said, though, I'll also say that the advice of keeping plenty of space open is good for newer users who may have other issues--at least the lack of free space is one less thing to consider.

I've also heard (though I don't have the understanding of the mechanics behind this) that a Mac needs some free space for the directory to work with.

A lack of free space, combined with not enough RAM, can cause all kinds of trouble.

~Lyssa

Anyone can test the idea of how much if any performance change there is with a small amount of disk space. Fill your drive up and test away. You should always have a backup drive anyway so if you fill it completely and something goes wrong you are not in any trouble. OS X does give a Warning dialog window when it determines you are getting too close to not having enough drive space. Trust your Mac a bit.

I have had my HD nearly full and then continued to record video. After giving its warning I continued to record. It finally quits recording. The application Quits. No harm was done. I then deleted all my "added on experimental drive filling data" and everything was back to normal.

My concern is this: I hate to tell people that are having any kind of problem with their Mac to throw money at it to fix the problem. If money is required to fix it then fine, do so. But don't tell people to buy more RAM or buy a bigger hard drive or buy anything else unless you can know for certain that that is what they need to fix an issue. If spending money upon the advice of others does not fix the issue it is easy to become disillusioned with the Mac, and I, as a Mac enthusiast, do not want to see that happen.

I still would not recommend running Mac OS X with less than 10% free space remaining on your startup volume. The free space is used for hidden swap files that Mac OS X needs do to virtual memory, and for other temporary files used by the system. Once free space gets low, the remaining free space becomes more and more fragmented into small pieces. That makes it hard for Mac OS X to operate efficiently.

Message was edited by: macbig