Demystifying Disk Space on your Mac

Dr. Mac’s Rants & Raves

Episode # 329

Did you know that your Mac’s performance deteriorates significantly as your startup disk fills up? As your startup drive gets closer to being full, the spinning beachball will appear and slow you down. And, you’ll notice that activities that used to happen almost instantly—such as launching apps, opening documents, or applying filters to photos — take much longer.

In my experience, many (if not most) Mac users do not understand how close to capacity their startup disk is. Worse, many Mac users don’t even know where to look for that information on their Mac.

So… let me offer you a quick lesson in disk space.

How Much Space is Left on my Disk?

First, select your startup disk’s icon in the Finder and choose File–>Get Info (or use its keyboard shortcut, Command+I).

A Get Info window with details about that disk will appear on the screen. You’re interested in three items near the bottom of the General section of the window: Capacity, Available, and Used.

These are the three salient items: Capacity, Available, and Used.

 

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    • Capacity tells you the size of your drive.
    
    
    • Available tells you how much disk space is currently
    
    
    • Used tells you how much disk space is in use.
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  

If your disk has less than 20% of its disk space available, you’re headed toward trouble. If you save (or download) a few large files, your disk will be nearly full, and your Mac will slow to a crawl.

And, if your startup disk has less than 10% of its space available, it won’t be long before you encounter slowdowns and spinning beachballs because of insufficient available disk space.

Why Available Space Matters…

If you’re wondering why a shortage of space on your startup disk affects your Mac’s performance so dramatically, it results from the way macOS’s Virtual Memory (VM) scheme works. If your Mac doesn’t have enough RAM to perform an operation, it creates a “swap file” on your startup disk, and then uses that swap file instead of the RAM it needs.

This swap file grows and shrinks dynamically, but typically requires several gigabytes of disk space. When you reboot your Mac, it resets itself to zero and grows dynamically from there as needed. After using my MacBook Pro (with 16GB of RAM) for two days without restarting, my swap file was 9GB; after a restart it dropped to 0 bytes.

After restarting, my swap file was reduced from 9GB to 0 bytes.

The bottom line is that when there is insufficient space on your startup disk for the swap file macOS must create, your Mac will slow to a crawl.

While rebooting provides a temporary reprieve, the new swap file will grow (and sometimes shrink) when you open, use, and quit apps. So… if your disk is nearly full—which is anything over 80% if you ask me—you should delete some files.

Unfortunately, I’m out of space. So, tune in next week when I’ll show you how to track down, archive (if you like), and/or delete those pesky large files quickly and easily.

Stay tuned.

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