Mac Speed Hogs: Storage Wars
This is a continuation of our posts on keeping your Mac speedy.
A common culprit of Macbook “moseying" is a lack of storage space. “But wait,” you say. “I still have 10 gigs free on my storage disk. Thats a lot of space right?”
So…NOPE. Not in the World of Mac. If your Mac’s free space drops below 20%, you will see a significant decline in speed and responsiveness. But you say, “20% is a huge chunk of my hard drive… I can only use 80% of my storage?”
Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. The free space you though you had…. it isn’t actually free. Your Mac uses "free space” to launch programs and swap large files around. If there’s not enough “free” disk space, then the Mac can't quickly swap the files it needs to run programs efficiently. Instead of quickly loading and running programs, its just going to show you the horrible spinning color wheel of doom. You may also get the infamous “storage disk almost full” message, which means you are nearly toast- and your iMac or Macbook is probably super slow as is.
One way to solve this is to remove disk space hogs from your Macbook or iMac. Click the Apple icon at the top left of your Mac, then click “about this Mac.” Then click the storage tab to do a quick check on how much space you have “free.” The “Manage” button offers a way to peruse what software seems to be hogging all your storage space. Not super useful though. Often “system” files take up most of the storage space (any file and every file can somehow get categorized as a system file). Thanks Apple.
However, one of the most helpful tools I’ve found in figuring out whats taking up space is the program GrandPerspective. This program scans a folder (or an entire drive!) and give’s a visual representation of whats taking up space, sorting files together in groups. Grand Perspective makes it super easy to figure out what your space hogs are… and quickly delete them! Pictures tend to be the biggest culprits on many Macs, though there are many other storage hogs (Music, Movies, Multiple copies of the same photo’s, old MacOS updates, and other media). Download Grand Perspective (its free!), and take a look at whats tying up your Mac’s storage and slowing you down.
