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Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Low Free Space in Mac Disk can Cause Slow Mac


You might be confronted with unresponsiveness, spinning colored beach ball, and many other similar slowdown issues on your Mac machine, even after you have a good hardware configuration. Well, the issue might not be the hardware, but probably the overfilled hard drive. The amount of data stored on a hard drive is one of the factors affecting the overall performance of a computer whether it is Windows or a Mac machine.


Actually, Mac OS X treats whatever free space the hard drive has as Virtual Memory playing a significant role in favour of its performance. Therefore, more the amount of virtual memory on a Mac drive, better will be the performance. You can check the complete data storage detail of the drive.

  • Go to Apple icon and select About This Mac
  • Click More info button and then System Report button
  • In the opening window, click Serial-ATA in the left pane
  • Now, see the information i.e. Capacity and Available free space for every Mac volume.

Alternatively, you can refer to Mac’s inbuilt disk management tool i.e. Disk Utility for precise description, such as Capacity, Available and Used space, etc. for each volume.

  • Launch Disk Utility
  • Click and note down these statistics for each volume shown below the source hard drive one by one.

Compute the percentage virtual memory using the formula i.e. (free space/capacity)*100 for each Mac volume. If the percentage virtual memory in any volume comes out to be less than or equal to 10%, you need to do something to free up the memory. 

Creating Free Space on the Hard Drive


Freeing up the memory does not direct the user to delete a definite amount of data from the concerned volume, but shift to any other volume containing large amount of free space. However, shifting some data to any external data storage device, such as an external hard drive would be more appropriate.


Go through each Mac volume individually and prepare a note of the data in use, items currently not in use or rarely used, and of course, the data never used yet stored.

Keep only those items in each volume, which are currently in use, frequently used, and the least priority items rarely used yet essential. Keep a backup copy of each document, file, and folder at any secure location.


Similarly, go through the installed applications on your Mac machine and keep only those which are currently in use and frequently used.


Tip: Keep at least 10% of the total capacity as free in each volume.

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