"About this Mac" storage pane

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Level 4

2,242 points

"About this Mac" storage pane

On Friday I took delivery of a brand new iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch. High Sierra 10.13.3) with a 500GB SSD internal drive, and am thoroughly enjoying it but have noticed one “issue” so far: the storage window in “About this Mac” is stuck forever calculating the space on the internal SSD, and stays grey, never showing the breakdown as coloured stripes as it did on my old 2013 iMac. However the space shown seems to be correct…

Is this an oddity with internal SSDs or is something wrong here? I´ve re-indexed Spotlight three times to no avail. This isn´t a big deal, I´d just like to know how to get the breakdown and colours back! And it doesn´t work in Safe Mode either. Thanks for any help/suggestions! Ian.

Posted on Mar 5, 2018 3:33 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

dialabrain

Level 10

122,525 points

Mar 5, 2018 4:14 AM in response to Ian Leckie

FWIW, I don't think anything is wrong. I've had that happen in the past and it just resolved itself. You can try booting into Safe Mode then restart normally.

Use safe mode to isolate issues with your Mac - Apple Support

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Answer 2

Ian Leckie Author

Level 4

2,242 points

Mar 5, 2018 4:19 AM in response to dialabrain

Thanks for replying so quickly! I´ve done the booting into Safe Mode, no change, so I'm not going to worry about it anymore — after all, I don't stare at the pane all day, and the benefits of a new 5K iMac far outweigh this little niggle! 🙂

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Answer 3

Ian Leckie Author

Level 4

2,242 points

Mar 11, 2018 5:59 AM in response to dialabrain

Just an update that might interest you, dialabrain! By fiddling around I seem to have accidentally found a way to fix it!

In the Storage pane in “About this Mac” I clicked on “Manage” at the upper right. All the various categories immediately showed space taken up except for Applications, which seemed to be stuck even after several minutes with a gray spinning wheel. So I clicked on “Applications” in the sidebar, and this stopped the spinning wheel and the storage was shown. And the coloured stripes appeared again!

I´ve done this several times now and it works every time (for the moment!). I wonder if this is a bug or just some oddity on my Mac…?!

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