Apple Hard Drive Space
Disk Inventory X. Screenshot by Sharon Vaknin/CNET. Disk Inventory X. This free program scans your hard drive and creates a graphical and textual summary of your disk space use, organizing your. Running out of hard drive space is incredibly annoying. OS X needs a good amount of free space to function properly so as things get full not only will you be unable to download or transfer large files, you'll start to get panicked warnings from the operating system. While hard drives keep getting bigger and cheaper, solid state drives do not. If you have a 2TB HD in your machine you'll.
The process to determine the amount of available hard drive space varies depending on what operating system you're using. To proceed, select your operating system from the list below and follow the instructions.
NoteMemory (RAM) and hard drive space are two completely different things. For memory, see: How to find how much RAM is installed on a computer.
Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 10 users
- Press the Windows key + E to open File Explorer.
- In the File Explorer window, in the left navigation pane, click on This PC.
- After selecting This PC, you see a section called Devices and drives.
- Each storage device has a status bar, the amount of free space available, and the total disk space.
Apple Hard Drive Space Windows 10
TipIf you would like to view additional information, right-click the drive and select Properties from the drop-down menu that appears.
Windows 95, 98, NT 4.x, 2000, ME, and XP users
- From the Windows desktop, double-click the My Computer icon.
- In My Computer, highlight and right-click the drive whose capacity you'd like to determine.
- In the menu that appears, select Properties.
- The Properties window displays the used space, free space, and the total capacity of the hard drive or other drives.
Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP users
If you are running Windows 2000 or Windows XP, My Computer also displays the total size and free space for each of the drives in the main window. If you want to view more information, and a graph of available space, follow the steps above.
TipYou can also view the available space through MS-DOS.
MS-DOS and Windows command line users
Open the MS-DOS prompt.
To determine the available space on a hard drive using MS-DOS, we recommend using the dir command.
At the MS-DOS prompt, type:
At the end of the directory listing, you see information similar to the example below.
As you can see above, the hard drive has over 16 GB of free space. If you want to see all files and how much space they are occupying, type the following commands.
The command above lists all files on your computer (except hidden files) and displays the total amount of disk space they utilize, and free disk space.
- See the dir command and cd command pages for further information about each of these commands.
Windows 3.x and NT 3.x users
In Windows 3.x or Windows NT 3.x, you can determine the available free space by highlighting the C: drive, and then looking at the status bar at the bottom of the screen.
TipYou can also view the available space through MS-DOS.
Linux and Unix users
macOS
To determine how much drive space is available on your MacBook or iMac, follow the steps below.
- In the menu bar at the top of the screen, click the Apple icon to open the Apple menu.
- In the Apple menu, select About This Mac.
- In the System Information window that opens, click the Storage tab at the top.
Additional information
Is the hard drive on your Mac constantly telling you that it is getting full? Are you running out of space to save your photos, music, videos, and other important files? Having to constantly manage your drive to make room for new items can be a time consuming and frustrating affair. But if you’re like many of us, chances are there are a lot of unnecessary files cluttering up your drive that can be removed. Here are five tips for reclaiming hard drive space on your Mac that may help you avoid running low on storage.
Clear the Downloads Folder
Whenever you download a file from the Internet it is automatically saved to the Downloads folder. Over time, that folder can accumulate a lot unnecessary stuff that can take up a great deal of storage space, including photos, videos, and application installers. From time to time, it is a good idea to clear out this folder, as it not only helps you save hard drive space, but it makes it easier to find new things that you’ve recently downloaded. By default, you’ll find a shortcut to the Downloads folder on the dock, but if you removed it from that location, the actual folder itself can also be found in your Home folder. Open it up and drag everything inside to the trash, then empty the trash to remove it forever.
Remove Unnecessary Photos and Video Files
Most text documents don’t take up much space on our hard drives, so deleting them doesn’t accomplish much. But photos and video files are a completely different story, as they can be quite large, and accumulate quickly. If you’re looking to reclaim hard drive space, it is often a good idea to review the photos and videos that you are storing on your computer to see what can be removed. Often times we have dozens – if not hundreds – of photos that are virtually duplicates of one another, or simply hold little or no value. Removing those items from our photo libraries is a good way to quickly free up storage space for use elsewhere. It is also a good idea to review the video files that are being stored in iMovie or other editing software, as removing those files will generally create more room too.
Uninstall Unused Applications
In addition to photos and video taking up a great deal of space, application software can quickly fill your drive as well. From time to time it is a good idea to review the contents of your Applications folder and see if there are any items that you can remove. For instance, Apple now ships every Mac with a copy of iWork preinstalled, but if you don’t want – or need – the software, you can remove it to help save space. You may also discover a few other programs that you had forgotten that you installed, and don’t ever use. These are also prime candidates for removal too.
Delete iPhone and iPad Apps
If you frequently plug your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch into your computer, it will sync any new applications that are found on those devices, and store a copy of it locally in iTunes. This can be useful if you quickly need to restore an app when you don’t have access to the Internet, but for the most part, those files are just taking up space. Since all of your apps are stored in the Cloud anyway, you can free up extra room on your drive by removing them. To do so, simply launch iTunes and click on the “My Apps” tab at the top of the screen. It will show you a list of all the iOS apps on your computer and allow you to select them all so that they can be easily deleted. It should be noted that iTunes only moves the files to the trash on your Mac, and to permanently remove them you’ll also need to empty the trash as well. Similarly, you can also free up hard drive space by automatically backing up your iOS devices to iCloud.
Use External Storage
One great way to free up space on your Mac’s hard drive is to use an external drive to save files that you want to keep, but don’t necessarily need access to on a regular basis. External drives are now very inexpensive, provide lots of extra storage, and are a safe and secure place to keep important documents. A network drive is also a great way to share files with other computers on your home network, and makes a great back-up solution for use with Time Machine.