How to change the limit on the "low disk space" warning?

It is a feature of OSX. Maybe you haven't noticed it yet because you have never gone that low in free disk space? But you know, the problem is that it's set ridiculously low, like 512MB or 256MB. However, i will now search for that TechTool Pro you mentioned, even though i don't like to put rubbish in my RAM to do stuff that the OS is supposed to do on its own.

Guys, thanks for all your answers, but there are two important things about this problem:

1) there is a built-in OSX alert about low disk space on the startup disk, so logic tells me that it can be controlled 🙂 the question is - how?

2) checking the free space in the Finder or in iStat/Dashboard makes no sense, because first of all it requires me to remember about this, which contradicts with the philosophy of Apple, plus there is software like Lightroom or Photoshop or Premiere Pro that may fill up a few gigabytes of free space within a short time.

Please help. It's especially important in case of SSD drive users, because in order to provide good wear leveling, you must keep a big chunk of free space on your SSD drive (there's a good article on the new Kingston V+100 SSD at Anandtech that is driven by the same controller as the flash drive inside the new Macbook Air - it does automatic garbage collection and wear leveling which is really nice unless you don't leave it enough free space to reorganize itself).

Thomas, I perfectly understand your point of view and i agree, however, again - i'm a messy user, just like most of us, really. With the new iMacs we have a 1TB and a 2TB drive inside respectively, so we're not worried at all yet 😉 But we did ran out of space on smaller (320-500GB) drives on our previous computers (not to forget that some system/app updates weigh in at >500MB).

Another issue is that we plan to upgrade to SSDs sometime soon, and the recommendation is to keep 20% free space there. In case of a 128GB or 256GB drive that's around 25GB and 50GB free space respectively which, i think, is no-one's definition of "running out of free space". Therefore there must be a way to change that threshold (and i don't mind digging deep down inside the system to change it).

Actually Thomas, a considerable chunk of my income comes from photography, and we (me & my fiance) specialize in event photojournalism, so after a wedding/conference/festival etc. we end up with huge amounts of files (sometimes even more than 3000 21mp RAW images per day) - if you're not careful enough, you might end up filling your remaining 30-40GB free space within minutes just by downloading all images from the CF cards to the hard drive.

The benefit of SSD is very visible when you work with photos too. I couldn't care less about any other piece of software benefiting from SSD usage, except the one i spend 90% time working in - Adobe Lightroom. And although i have enough RAM now (8GB seems perfect for Lightroom alone, I don't get any page outs) and enough processing power (i7 2.8GHz gets all its 8 cores used by that software), the only bottleneck is the speed of the HDD. The rest of the hardware needs to wait for the HDD and that's frustrating. SSD is the way to go.

Btw, i did some extensive tests running the same library in Lightroom on a Macbook Air 11" (1.4GHz C2D) and on my slower iMac (3.06GHz C2D). The photo-to-photo processing time was faster, much snappier, almost instant on the MBA. Only when it came to the final export of RAW files to JPGs did the iMac show the faster processing and it was not even exactly 3.06/1.4=2.2 times faster, rather only 1.9x. It happens so because the final export depends on the processor, not on the harddrive so much, while skipping from photo to photo requires previews to be read off the HDD.

So, although this became an off-topic discussion now - yes, there are benefits of SSDs for photographers and yes - we need a way to be reminded by the system itself about its health problems 😉

Message was edited by: adamkozlowski79

Guys, thanks a lot for all your insightful answers, even though we're steering away from the main topic. I'm still looking for some kind of script or a OS mod that would bump the warning threshold on free disk space.

Indeed, having an SSD for the system alone is a nice way of using its potential, however, my subjective view on that is that i don't need my system to boot up faster or Safari/Mail to operate faster - i'm satisfied with the way it is now.

However, as Thomas mentioned before, Lightroom has a cache (a catalog folder with preview cache in it, among other files), which I would plan to move to the SSD drive, for example, by removing the unused SuperDrive and substituting it with a SATA 2.5" caddy/drive bay. Guides on iFixit give a good step-by-step outline how to do it. So instead of risking it all by moving to an SSD-only setup, i'd get just a fast SSD for the Lightroom catalog.

With the Mac Pros, there are awesome options from OCZ (Revo line) for a PCI Express-based flash storage cards that have RAID built in, so they are faster than anything on the market.