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How many GBs of space should be left in order for my 300GB HD MacBook Pro to continue running smoothly?

Well, 319 to be exact. I am currently using 307GB and have 12GB left. What is the recommended amount to have free?

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Posted on Apr 19, 2012 7:12 PM

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7 replies

Apr 19, 2012 9:07 PM in response to ammmmber

According to Apple documentation, Mac OS X 10.7 should have at least 9 GB free on the startup volume for proper operation. Less than that, and you may start to get "disk full" warnings, or worse.


Of course, you should have more free space than the bare minimum to allow for expansion of your data. How much more depends on your usage pattern. If you're sure you won't add more than 3 GB of data anytime soon, you should be OK.


There's a widespread belief among some users of this site that a certain percentage, typically 10-15%, of the boot volume should always be kept free. That belief has no basis in fact or logic, but you will probably be told that nevertheless.

Apr 20, 2012 4:01 AM in response to ammmmber

I would urge you to transfer data to an external HDD or better yet, install a larger one. You are approaching the limits with you current one. Your usage pattern as Linc Davis suggests is a factor, but if your were to try and record video, a one hours worth would almost max out your current available space (1 hr = 8-9 GB).


I posed this question to the Seagate people and the best that they were willing to tell me was that as more data was entered on a HDD, there would be a performance degradation. The could/would not tell me if that was linier, quadratic or inverse square. They also echoed the 15% free space 'rule' that Linc davis takes exception to. In Linc Davis' defense, I was not told any scientific basis for same.


It seems to me that the free space should be determined more by the types of applications one uses as opposed to any arbitrary percentage. An application will require the same space on a HDD regardless of the disk size. Also the larger the disk capacity, the better performance one can expect.


Ciao.

Apr 20, 2012 4:31 AM in response to ammmmber

I'm in the 80% filled crowd, just based upon experience because the hard drive sectors gets so small the closer the drive gets filled up and one needs to have some cushion as the computer may not boot if the drive is completely filled.


So maintaining a safe distance from the edge is my policy.


I keep my main boot drive partitioned 50/50, as the first 50% of hard drives are faster than the second 50%. due to larger sectors which make for faster reads and writes.


My second 50% is a auto-clone of the first for alternate option key boot & backup on my mobile machine.


If by chance I need more space, I can simply erase the second partition on the road, I keep bootable clones on external hard drives at home too for hardware protection and anti-malware purposes.



See "Storage drive" the answer for "you need to free up space on the startup drive"


 Most commonly used backup methods explained

Apr 20, 2012 5:18 AM in response to Linc Davis

I've never quite understood the 10-15% rule. That might have made sense back in the day when drive capacities were only increasing by MBs yearly so 10-15% from year to year meant basically the same amount. I don't see why the amount of free space you need to run properly would have any basis on the capacity of the drive (which is basically what using a percentage would mean). If I have a 500GB drive, 10% of that would be 50GB (which seems more than enough for stable operations with plenty of headroom)... why would moving up to a 1TB drive suddenly mean I need 100GB of free space?

Apr 20, 2012 6:00 AM in response to JoeyR

Likely because it's easier to say 15% because people's drive size varies.


Some have very small drives, 120GB at 10% would be 12GB, very dangerously close to the limit, especially since there is a lot of behind the scenes stuff being saved to the drive etc.


The object is when people look at their disk space in Activity Monitor to know that they need to stay away from the edge and start considering a storage drive to offload their files before trouble starts.


I don't like going over 50% for performance reasons.

How many GBs of space should be left in order for my 300GB HD MacBook Pro to continue running smoothly?

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