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investigating my mac harddrives
bodiema
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
A bit ago I got a new macbook for school next year. After a few weeks I think I'm finally getting settled into OSX and bringing over all my music and movies from my PC. However, it seems as if I have 10gb hidden somewhere on my macbook.
When I look at the info of my hard drive it says I'm using 43gb. My music takes about 17gb, my movies about 7gb, and my applications apparently take about 5gb. I can't figure out where the other 13gb has gone. I've looked in all the other default folders in finder and cannot figure out where this 13gb went. I know my trash bin is empty but is there any way to defrag the mac harddrive? A quick google did not yield me anything I could apply. I have this vision of some utility that would conveniently display my hard drive allotment by folder in a pie chart, but that is probably wishful thinking.
On a related note, my 80gb iPod now only has a total capacity of 74gb. Does formating really take 6gb or again is there a defrag utility? By the way, my iPod is still windows formatted it seems to sync just fine so I thought there was no reason to change it over to mac format.
In any case, a quick summation:
1) Where'd the 13gb go on my MacBook?
2) Where'd the 6gb go on my iPod?
3) Is there any advantage to formatting my iPod for Macs if it syncs alright?
Help is greatly appreciated.
When I look at the info of my hard drive it says I'm using 43gb. My music takes about 17gb, my movies about 7gb, and my applications apparently take about 5gb. I can't figure out where the other 13gb has gone. I've looked in all the other default folders in finder and cannot figure out where this 13gb went. I know my trash bin is empty but is there any way to defrag the mac harddrive? A quick google did not yield me anything I could apply. I have this vision of some utility that would conveniently display my hard drive allotment by folder in a pie chart, but that is probably wishful thinking.
On a related note, my 80gb iPod now only has a total capacity of 74gb. Does formating really take 6gb or again is there a defrag utility? By the way, my iPod is still windows formatted it seems to sync just fine so I thought there was no reason to change it over to mac format.
In any case, a quick summation:
1) Where'd the 13gb go on my MacBook?
2) Where'd the 6gb go on my iPod?
3) Is there any advantage to formatting my iPod for Macs if it syncs alright?
Help is greatly appreciated.
bodiema on
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2. I think that's just the advertising thing, with the 8 bits per byte, etc.
3. There isn't really an advantage for formatting it to Macs, except that you can update on it. I was recommended to format my iPod on a Windows machine, so I can update it from both Windows and OS X, but I don't think you can install updates on a OS X machine via a Windows formatted iPod, so I eventually just stuck to formatting the iPod via OS X so I can install updates on my MacBook.
Two options: 1. Reinstall from the OS disks, making sure to do a custom install and deselecting the languages, or 2. google for ways to remove the alternate languages from currently installed software - warning you can mess up big time if you do this wrong.
This is basically the oldest trick in computer marketting ever.
Also the amount your seeing is the amount that can be used to store files, it removes the amount needed for the Master File Table(or other mechanism for you OS, I am unfamilair with the Mac equivliant) that keeps track of all the files and (in some cases) essential OS files that must on no account be overwritten are also removed from the actual size remaining.
Reinstalling and reformatting may not see any improvement, if you think something is physically wrong with the disk it would be better to do a scan disk (or the mac equivilant) to find bad sectors and cleaning them so they can be read and written to.
Wrong.
When hard drives are formatted, a lot of little blocks of space are created within the filesystem, and data is stored within them. Indexes that identify and track those blocks uses space, bigger hard drives have more space and this require more overhead. Different filesystems do this in different ways, default block sizes vary by file system, and the user can change the block size meaning to create less overhead or enhance disk performance. Creating extra partitions also creates extra overhead within this mess. So a hard drive is advertised with the raw amount of data it can hold, because in the hands of the end-user, the actual amount it ends up holding varies wildly.
The only way to get some of the overhead back is to reformat the hard disk using a larger block size. Given that he had to ask about this in the first place, that definitely is not something the OP should try.
No, sk1nnyman was right. 80 000 000 000 bytes is 80GB in decimal, 74.5GB in binary.
Another explanation is that OSX stores an image of RAM to the harddisk, equal to the capacity of system memory you have, whenever you go into sleep mode. That file is located at /var/vm/sleepimage and if you have 2GB of RAM it will be 2GB on disk.
Garage Band also uses a lot of space. You can find an evaluation copy of MS Office in your Applications directory, it's safe to go ahead and delete that.
The app "MonoLingual" will remove the alternate languages you don't need, saving maybe a few more GB.