Stop receiving "Your disk is almost full" notification

OS X from Yosemite on is designed to make use of all of your RAM (because RAM that is not used is useless), this has been the way for some years.

Buying a machine that has insufficient storage space is on you, the system is behaving as it should, you just need a bigger drive to put things on.

I understand that i can change the drive to the bigger one (as the drive is not soldered in motherboard in this model). And I agree that fully used RAM is great when it is managing well. But since upgrading to Sierra it leads to usage of a lot of swap (with the same apps) and system is not working as well as it used to on EI Capitan.

And I don't want to argue about I should or not to buy more storage (doesn't matter how: upgrade mac or pay for icloud) because it is enough free space for me and for any unix-like system even for bugos (ex. no such notification appears in ei cap, yosemite or sun solaris, freebsd or any linux distribution). And this is separate topic to discuss.

But as mentioned before this notification appears every 10 seconds that is annoying and this is a bug. Possibility to stop it or to snooze it for some time without disabling all notifications would be wonderful fix. Nothing great, just small fix.

"There's nothing dangerous about it. 3GB free is where I'm running with a sizeable swap file. I've been managing my macbook with a low amount of headroom for years with no problems. I don't want to have to free up several GB of space. I just want to know if there's a way to independently turn off the notifications."

Changing the preferences with Thomas Tempelman's PrefsEditor is not bad. But I would like to make an additional comment in case your disk is an SSD:

If your disk is an SSD it maybe better not to have so little free space left:

On a SSD there is GarbageCollection/LoadLevelling running constantly to free up space taken by deleted files in order to make that space writable again. To have that not to slow down the disk and be as levelling the number of writes spread out evenly on the disk (the number of writes is limited until that spot is "dead"), it is generally recommended to have about 10% space free, with a minimum of at least15GB-20GB. This remark is only for SSDs, not HDDs.

happy computing.

Lexiepex, thank you for your note!

It is quite good comment about SSD disks. But actually modern SSDs have very big resource (about several TB per good 128GB disks) and if it is less than 10% of free space left it is not so bad as it used to be 8-10 years ago. Also TRIM (Garbage collection) shoud not be running constantly (maybe something changed and GC now running always (even in java/c# it is not running always)?). It should run if no free blocks left (it is filled by deleted files/parts of files) or it should be sheduled (ex. every week/month). In some drives (not in mac computers) this option even doesn't work time to time (ex. some of SandForce controllers).

And if I don't rewrite a lot of files (or for ex. if I boot with read only filesystem) it is defenitely not bad for SSD (I did not try apply RO boot to osx, it should be kernel flag but maybe it is impossible).

In general, I agree with your comment and would advise to anybody to use less than 90% of SSD. And I will change my drive to the bigger one soon with downgrading from Sierra to EI (at least I will use split view again 😎 without hanging entire interface).

Thank you again for your comment, I think it will be useful for some users.

PS: But I think you will agree that no possibility for disabling (or at least snooze for a while) one certain notification is a bug (or attempt of apple to sell their new computers/icloud storage 😉 )

But actually modern SSDs have very big resource (about several TB per good 128GB disks)

Ahh, yes, I would very much like to hear how you can get even one TB (which is 1,000 GB) - much less "several" into/out of a 128 GB disk. Very interesting.

The several 1TB per good 129GB disks, I don't understand that.

WearLeveling works only on the disk itself afaik.

Trim should not be used (Apple SSD have a modified controller). But nowadays the trim command is not read by modern controllers (Sandforce, Marvell), so why bother.

Lex

No trim as I said before. I suppose that you read Trim somewhere, but that is only the command, does not say that it is used on the SSD (it is not read on SSDs anymore).

About your issues with Sierra compared to ElCapitan: Sierra is smaller and more efficient even than ElCapitan. You should solve the issues.

About "..ssds data as it has been used very few for writing": don't forget that the OS is reading and writing continously.

Well. I will write not only for you but for everyone who think that ssd will die fast in case of full usage.

Sandfroce had a bug with trim. Apple's SSD react on this command. Wearlevelling is tech that help to use all blocks equally to avoid destruction only in part of blocks. It works better when free space is maximal (i.e. full free ssd) . And if you don't rewrite full ssd every time it will die faster (and you are right).

But will calculate. MLC chips (I think it is not SLC) Apple's SSD that have resource about 10000 cycles of rewriting. Let's get some good 250GB ssd and will write 5000IOPS 4KB blocks (~20MB/sec, about 1.5TB per day) around the clock. Than 1% of this ssd will die around in half of month (really fast!). How much less times indeed writes average user per day? I think at least 100 times less (about 15GB). Than 1% of ssd will die in 50 months, it is about 4 years. Let's think now that we rewrite only 1GB every day from 5GB free, so it will serve about 1.2 years. Let's remember about 30% blocks for remapping in ssd (250*0.3=75). It is 25 times of 5GB than more than 25 years of usage. But I think, person who have 5GB free does not rewrite 1GB per day.

But it is theoretically, in real life SSD die time to time even it's resource is OK as other complex techniques do. And even when smart shows everything is OK (ex. Google's investigation about hdds) .

My example of long time living SSD: It's my old Kingmax (controller based on cheap Sandforce) 60GB that was bought 5 years ago (it's smart doesn't work, bugs of first Sandforce controllers). It was always used with 1-3GB free and several times was fully rewritten. Now it is working but I don't use it because it is too small for me. I think that more than 5 years is more than enough for average user.

PS: i used my old ssd for long time and rewrite a lot of data to it (but it's smart broken and shows that I wrote only 32gb to it when it is full)

If you want another Disk analyser try DriveDx: it has an enormous database, and has very good explanations on all smart items, and formulas for the life expectancy.

binaryfruit.com

Samsung had issues with trim also in the beginning. Afaik the controllers are very good now, much better than the crude Trim command and don't read it anymore.

Trim or principles of trim command in any form will be for ssd controllers because for controller there are no deleted files because it doesn't know about FS anything. Trim is just the way to say to controller about deleted files in file system for physical clean up. If there are different way to say it (as for example for scsi interface it is "unmap") it is just analog of trim. Even if trim works automatically for every deleted or rewritten file it is still analog of trim. Or imho can be named trim anyway.

jasper, you have liberated me from apple's patronising arrogance/narrative. and yes I will have to now personally manage the free space on my hard-drive, whilst remembering to safely eject my usb drive. thanks hugely.

I agree that the notification telling you disk space is low is warranted, but displaying this every 10-30 seconds is nothing short of intrusive and completely unnecessary. If I choose to browse the internet without any "anti-phishing" or "anti-virus" technology, then let me. If I choose to use my laptop with a 'meagre' 6GB of free space, then again, let me. Warn me about it, sure, but give me an opportunity (say, 7 days), to fix it. Irritating me every few seconds with annoying popups does nothing other than want to make me switch back to Windows... This "helpful" setting really needs an option to be disabled, or at least "postponed" for a period of time (like the OSX upgrade notifications).

Apple, please stop treating people like idiots and actually listen to your customers. I bet if your own engineers had to stop work and click on a "go away" button every minute or so then this behaviour would soon change....

Same problem, only I have 76Gb available on my 250Gb Hard Drive. Seems that in the list of what I must clean up and the only thing I have that makes the list look full is my attached network drive with 6.5Tb of data. Either somehow 76Gb is considered to little space (though I've had this same amount free since pre-Yosemite) or it's calculating my network drives. I should note that I have iTunes library pointing to a partition on this external drive. When I change this via iTunes setting to point to native location, the message goes away, but then I can no longer access my media and iTunes must rebuilt its index.

funkysphere wrote:

When I change this via iTunes setting to point to native location, the message goes away…

You have just proved that it is your external storage not the internal. Check how much free space is on that disk. The OS is warning you because iTunes will fail to work correctly if that disk becomes unwritable because it is full. Data loss is bad m'kay…

indiekiduk2 wrote:

Somebody posted the solution to change the alert settings here but it's been deleted for some reason.

Yup.

Moderators why did the last 'managing diskspaced' post disappear? It looks like spite.

That appeared to be a valid way to set limits & offer some control of this issue, it is better than the suggestions to unload notificationd IMO. If it was harmful at least post explaining why.

Are 'defaults write' commands now considered harmful & not allowed on this site? It seems ridiculous if that is the case.

defaults read com.apple.diskspaced