Adding hard drive space?

My Macbook has a hard drive of 120GBs but I only have 20GBs left. Is it possible for me to add more hard drive space?
Thanks much

Depending on what you need it for, you could just add an external (USB and/or FireWire) hard drive. Some are very reasonable at sale prices. An indication of what you plan on using the additional space for might be a good start as to recommendations.

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I HAVE BEEN USING MID 2011 MACBOOK AIR 11 INCH.I AM LOSING MY HARD DRIVE SPACE WITHOUT ANY REASON.FIRST IT WAS 84.1 GB NOW IT IS 83.9 AND SLOWLY LOSING SPACE.WHY IS THAT?? PLS PLS HELP

I have macbook air mid 2011 .. Now i am losing my hard drive space without any apparent reason..I am not downloading anything not i am adding anything still that i am losing my hard drive space for no apparent reason..pls pls help..

I have never heard of a relation between the enabled state of Time Machine, and boot. Its probably coincidental.
Try booting in Safe Mode (hold down shift key, whilst booting). Then check for apllications in your Users & Groups preferences that are starting up with login. Disable all startup apps, then eanable them one at a time, booting normall. See which app is possibly hanging.
You can also try doing a Repair Permissions and Repair Disk on your startup drive. This must be done within Disk Utility when booted to your Recovery Partition. To boot to the Recovery Partition, hold down the OPTION key while booting, and select the Recovery Partition drive to boot from. Then run Disk Utility.

My macbook pro's hard drive space is constantly shrinking...is it a virus?

My hard drive space went from 20 GB remaining to 15.6 GB remaining in less than a day and it's constantly declining without adding any new files or programs. I don't know what's causing it! Please Help!

See Where did my Disk Space go?

Missing Large Chunk of Hard Drive Space - Pavilion Dv4t

Hi All,
I purchased a Pavillion Dv4t about a month ago with a 320 gb hard drive. Upon first inspection, I noticed that the drive partitions, when added together, fell way short of 320gb. The C drive plus Recovery drive = 298 gb! I initially wondered if the missing space was a hidden partition containing vista, and that when I custom installed windows 7, I would be able to formatt that part of the drive to install 7. This does not appear to be the case as the install upgrade only showed the 2 partitions totaling 298gigs.
Does anyone know what that missing space is and how to recover it? Or is it something important that I shouldent mess with?
Has anyone else had this problem or noticed that they are missing this much hard drive space?
Also, I've run a hdd diagnodtic test wich showed no drive issues.
Thanks!

Capacity measurements
A disassembled and labeled 1997 hard drive. All major components were placed on a mirror, which created the symmetrical reflections.
Raw unformatted capacity of a hard disk drive is usually quoted with SI prefixes (metric system prefixes), incrementing by powers of 1000; today that usually means gigabytes (GB) and terabytes (TB). This is conventional for data speeds and memory sizes which are not inherently manufactured in power of two sizes, as RAM and Flash memory are. Hard disks by contrast have no inherent binary size as capacity is determined by number of heads, tracks and sectors.
This can cause some confusion because some operating systems may report the formatted capacity of a hard drive using binary prefix units which increment by powers of 1024.
A one terabyte (1 TB) disk drive would be expected to hold around 1 trillion bytes (1,000,000,000,000) or 1000 GB; and indeed most 1 TB hard drives will contain slightly more than this number. However some operating system utilities would report this as around 931 GB or 953,674 MB, whereas the correct units would be 931 GiB or 953,674 MiB. (The actual number for a formatted capacity will be somewhat smaller still, depending on the file system). Following are the correct ways of reporting one Terabyte.
SI prefixes (Hard Drive) equivalent Binary prefixes (OS) equivalent
1 TB (Terabytes) 1 * 10004 B 0.9095 TiB (Tebibytes) 0.9095 * 10244 B
1000 GB (Gigabytes) 1000 * 10003 B 931.3 GiB (Gibibytes) 931.3 * 10243 B
1,000,000 MB (Megabytes) 1,000,000 * 10002 B 953,674.3 MiB (Mebibytes) 953,674.2 * 10242 B
1,000,000,000 KB (Kilobytes) 1,000,000,000 * 1000 B 976,562,500 KiB (Kibibytes) 976,562,500 * 1024 B
1,000,000,000,000 B (bytes) - 1,000,000,000,000 B (bytes) -
Microsoft Windows reports disk capacity both in a decimal integer to 12 or more digits and in binary prefix units to three significant digits.
The capacity of an HDD can be calculated by multiplying the number of cylinders by the number of heads by the number of sectors by the number of bytes/sector (most commonly 512). Drives with the ATA interface and a capacity of eight gigabytes or more behave as if they were structured into 16383 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors, for compatibility with older operating systems. Unlike in the 1980s, the cylinder, head, sector (C/H/S) counts reported to the CPU by a modern ATA drive are no longer actual physical parameters since the reported numbers are constrained by historic operating-system interfaces and with zone bit recording the actual number of sectors varies by zone. Disks with SCSI interface address each sector with a unique integer number; the operating system remains ignorant of their head or cylinder count.
The old C/H/S scheme has been replaced by logical block addressing. In some cases, to try to "force-fit" the C/H/S scheme to large-capacity drives, the number of heads was given as 64, although no modern drive has anywhere near 32 platters.
[edit] Formatted disk overhead
For a formatted drive, the operating system's file system internal usage is another, although minor, reason why a computer hard drive or storage device's capacity may show its capacity as different from its theoretical capacity. This would include storage for, as examples, a file allocation table (FAT) or inodes, as well as other other operating system data structures. This file system overhead is usually less than 1% on drives larger than 100 MB. For RAID drives, data integrity and fault-tolerance requirements also reduce the realized capacity. For example, a RAID1 drive will be about half the total capacity as a result of data mirroring. For RAID5 drives with x drives you would lose 1/x of your space to parity. RAID drives are multiple drives that appear to be one drive to the user, but provides some fault-tolerance.
A general rule of thumb to quickly convert the manufacturer's hard disk capacity to the standard Microsoft Windows formatted capacity is 0.93*capacity of HDD from manufacturer for HDDs less than a terabyte and 0.91*capacity of HDD from manufacturer for HDDs equal to or greater than 1 terabyte.
click Kudos to say thanks if I helped

Do you have any ideas why Motion 5 would run slow on a computer? I have an Imac with 8Gigs of ram, and plenty of hard drive space, but it still gives me the beach ball when I add a few lights and effects. I'm at the end of my rope.

Do you have any ideas why Motion 5 would run slow on a computer? I have an Imac with 8Gigs of ram, and plenty of hard drive space, but it still gives me the beach ball when I add a few lights and effects. I'm at the end of my rope.

You probably don't really need 1080 at 60 for your finished projects but since you're just starting out with Motion, you need to lower your expectations. A long way. 1080 is about 2 million pixels per frame, DV is only about 400,000. That's not just five times as many pixels for the Mac to track; everything in video is exponential.
Explore the training tutorials available by Mark Spencer. You will get an idea of how his super powerful machine reacts with the software.
Adding a light roughly doubles the processing time over flat scenes. Two lights increases processing again. Reflections require processing the lights and then calculating the reflections so add another quarter of the time required for flat scenes. Add camera movement, motion blur, and depth of field and you need exponentially more processing time for every frame. The preload of renders into RAM is one of the cooler features of Motion, as comapred to After Effects, but that takes tons of time, to.
Try working in ye olde DV resolution for a few days. Get to know the software's limitations and what gets imposed by your Macintosh. Step up to 720p/30 and see how things slow down.

Hard drive space disappearing

Ever since my Time Capsule has stopped working [which is a separate issue (it says it has become a 'read only' drive)] my hard drive space on my mac book pro has been disappearing into thin air. I went from 15 GB of free space down to 584 MB in less than a week, without me adding a thing, to my knowledge. I know this is vague, but has any one ever heard of an elusive disk space devourer? Help!

Use Disc Inventory X to scan the hard drive and see what's taking up all the space. It's possible some log file has gone haywire and is writing/filling the disc.

Hard drive space overview

Hi, I'm starting to run out of hard drive space and I would really like to figure out where it's all coming from. Beyond just ctrl clicking categories to see how big each is and adding them all up, is there a way to view like a pie chart or something showing an overview of my hard drive?

I've got a server that's just lost all it's disk space (about a 100Gb unaccounted for) on the boot drive. I just tried Disk Inventory X and it shows only about 14Gb used. Not what I was hoping for.
The cause seems to be a runaway application (Now Software's Now Up To Date Event Server), which was writing continuously until I killed it. But I can't find where it's been writing to...
Justin

What is taking up hard drive space?

hello.
I have a power mac (pre intel) quad core desktop running 10.5.8.
I have noticed it being very sluggish lately.
From taking 5 minutes to boot up, to browsers taking longer to launch(with the color wheel spinning longer until the browser is fully ready), to inputing text into fields in a browser window(the text gets entered a second or two after typing). Even when I open a finder window, the icons for every file, as well as the size listing of each file/folder will take like 10 seconds to start loading one at a time. I never noticed that before.
So I opened disk utility, and noticed that I have filled up 160GB out of the 233GB that this hard drive has. That seemed like a really high number.
So I added up the total size of the home folders in all 4 users on this computer, and they add up to 27GB. The system folder is 4 gigs, and the main Library folder at the top level is 51 gigs. I don't think there is anything left. That adds up to 82GBs. Where is the other 78GBs coming from?
I know I'm missing something, but I can't figure out what.
Even still, I don't know that this is the reason for my computer to act sluggish, but now I'm curious how I'm filling up so much hard drive space.
Any thoughts on finding this info out, and/or fixing the sluggish issue?
Thanks!!

On the space issue, has everybody emptied trash? You each have your own and if somebody doesn't... There's varous utilities for scanning drives for space usage. Some are free, others not. I think Omnidisksweeper is free. Search the Discussions for this subject and the others will probably be mentioned.
A few GB are kind of hidden and not accounted for, I think. Some cache files, etc.
160? I mean only 160? That's peanuts by modern standards.
Slow computer. Might start by verifying hard drive with Disk Utility. Installing and using Applejack would be good too. Are you sure everybody is logged out and didn't leave a ton of applications running in their account?
I'm too lazy to remove the old formatting from my boilerplate post on this:
*Quick checks*
Have you emptied the Trash?
*Reading on hard drive space issues*
[Erasing free space results in erroneous full disk warning|http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=459623&seqNum=9]
[Where did my disk space go?|http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=Forum38&Number=770243]
[X-Lab: Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk|http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/freeingspace.html]
[Amazing Disappearing Drive Space|http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/TigerMisc.html]
[Increase HD Free Space|http://macosx.com/forums/howto-faqs/275191-how-easily-increase-hd free-space-laptop.html]
[How to free up my disk space|http://www.macmaps.com/diskfull.html]
[Baby Boomer's Apple Discussions post|http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10189607#10189607]
*Utilities for investigating drive space usage*
[Disk Inventory (free)|http://www.derlien.com/]
[OmniDiskSweeper (free)|http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/download/]
[WhatSize|http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/] (now shareware and only useful on <20GB drives until you buy it)
[GrandPerspective|http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/]

MY PRECIOUS Hard Drive Space

First time posting a question.
So I have an iBook g4. My problem has to do with my Hard Drive. I am down to my last 2GB of hard drive space --oh no! What do I do to get more hard drive space??? I LOVE DOWNLOADING PODCASTS TO LISTEN TO WHEN I'M RELAXING AND DL MUSIC AND PHOTOS. I LOVE MY MAC and I'm really stupid when it comes to technical computer stuff. But i'm willing to do ANYTHING to keep my files intact. I need some help...
ANY SUGGESTIONS WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATION

Hi Heyitsme and welcome to Apple Discussions.
"First time posting a question".. and a very good one it is too. You are sailing very close to the wind with only 2 GB of free space. !0% of free space is considered to be the absolute bare minimum with 15% or greater considered to be ideal.
In the long term you need to consider getting an external drive to store, perhaps, your iTunes library if it is large, and/or your iPhoto library. A better long term solution would be to, not only have an external for back up, but also have a larger internal drive installed. I believe 250 GB is the current largest size available for iBooks which require a PATA/EIDE 2½" drive. The drives themselves are relatively inexpensive, the installation more expensive unless you feel confident in DIY. Post back if you require more info.
In the short term you need to clear some space if only for the immediate health of your HD, OSX, and your data.
There are a few quick fixes that you can do immediately with no ill effects.
For example, on my iBook, I have removed GarageBand from Applications and its Loops from HD/Library/Application Support. As my iBook only has a combo drive and I'm not into video editing anyway I have trashed iDVD & iMovie. (Not DVD player). I have also trashed preloaded games and World Book, and its associated files.
OS X comes with a vast library of printer drivers, the large proportion of which will never be used by the average user.
Printer drivers are in the HD/Library/Printers folder. You can safely delete any named drivers that you don't have a printer for. For example, if you have a Canon, you can remove Epson, Lexmark, Hewlett Packard & Brother drivers. Epson alone takes up close to 1gb. You can even remove specific drivers from within the manufacturer's folder. For example, if you have an Epson C86 you can safely trash any other specific drivers in the Epson folder like C46, C66 etc. If, at a later date, you buy a printer whose driver you removed they can be added from your install disk, the disk that comes with the printer or downloaded.
A word of warning: More cautious heads than mine advise against messing in the HD/Library, but if you stick to the examples above, i.e. GarageBand loops, World Book and printer drivers you will be OK.
Certainly, I have had no problems with my system after removing those examples.
Check, too, in your music folder. If you have 'Copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to library' selected in iTunes preferences/Advanced it is possible that you have, say, 'xyz song' in the first level of your Music folder and the same song in Music/iTunes/iTunes Library. If you are sure that you do have 'xyz song' in iTunes, it is safe to delete from 'Music'. The same principle can apply to your Pictures folder and iPhoto Library, but staying with iTunes for a moment, with iTunes open select Edit in the menu bar, then 'Show duplicate songs'. You can trash duplicates if you are sure that they are true duplicates, i.e. exact name, artist and file size. Another little note of caution, neither iTunes nor iPhoto likes having its library messed with from within a Finder window. Resolve duplicates from within the respective application only.
If you are downloading a lot of stuff it is possible that you have a large 'Incomplete' folder built up over time from aborted downloads. This folder can be found in your 'Home' folder. It is perfectly safe to remove any and all files from this folder.
Downloaded applications can be a cause of wasted space. An application is usually downloaded as a .DMG (Disk Image). Once the app is installed in your Applications folder there is no necessity to keep the .DMG, although if it is a 'paid for' app it would be wise to back it up to an external/burn to a CD before removing it from your internal. Sometimes apps are downloaded as .zip files, leaving two largely redundant duplicates of the same thing. Again, back up one or the other file type to another medium before trashing if the app is paid for or difficult to find again.
Some excellent advice has been posted by ~JB~ , with corresponding words of caution.
Edit: The application Whatsize, linked to in ~JB~'s advice above, used to be a free application. It is now shareware, though I believe it is still free to use on smaller drives such as yours. You can get similar information using Finder, however.
Open a new Finder window, select Command (⌘) 2, for list view, then Command (⌘) J. Check the 'This window only' button and the 'Size' and 'Calculate all Sizes' boxes. Wait a few moments while it 'calculates'. You should be able to see which folders are taking up the most space. DO NOT REMOVE OR MESS WITHIN THE "SYSTEM" FOLDER or, with the exception of GarageBand loops and printers, the Library folder.
Dr Smoke has some advice here too.
Last but by no means least, when you have finished dumping your unwanted stuff in the trash, don't forget to empty it. You haven't regained the space until you do
…and definitely last this time: If in doubt leave it alone and ask!
Have fun,
Adrian

Keep running out of hard drive space

i keep getting a message saying i'm low on space. i trash many things then i have 10 gigs available or something. the next day, having added nothing, i get the message again and it's down to very low. any thoughts? thanks

Which OS version is installed on your computer. Your system profile is a complete blank! If you are still using Tiger, check out the Article: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305454 Mac OS X 10.4: FileVault - "There isn't enough space on your hard disk..." alert. Article pertain to you?
Where did my Disk Space go?
Hard Drive Space Resources:
Slimming your hard drive
Seven ways to free up drive space
OmniDiskSweeper is a free utility that checks HD space.
FreeSpace cost $1 or is a free utility that checks HD space.
SpaceControl is a free utility that checks HD space.
FreeSpace cost $.99 - FreeSpace shows you how much space is available on all local, connected, and network drives with a single click.
Rule of thumb: You should never let your hard drive get to where you have only 10-15% of space left.

HT4527 How can I relocate my music so it lives outside my computer in a hard drive? I'm running out of hard drive space.

How can I relocate my music so it lives outside my computer in a hard drive? I'm running out of hard drive space.

The referenced article does not address the issue of just moving the music files outside my iMac, then still use my iMac and iTunes to manipulate those files without them adding bulk memory space to my iMac. Would like to have the link or alias, or path fully described so that I may keep adding more music. Plus one more thing, I would like to be guided as to how to back all of this music onto my capsule via time machine.

Best way to increase hard drive space on Time Capsule?

Quick questions for those of you who've increased the storage on your Time Capsules:
1. Did you swap out the internal hard drive or did you add a USB external hard drive?
2. For those that added a USB external hard drive, what are the drawbacks? I've read some threads saying their external hard drive is flaky and they need to power cycle the TC to get their hard drive visible on their Macs.
Here's my situation: I have two Macs backing up to a 500GB TC and I only have 13GB free. I want to increase the hard drive space and am toying with these two options:
1. Swap out the internal hard drive to 1TB and have both Macs back up the new hard drive.
2. Add a 1TB external USB hard drive and have one Mac back up to that drive while the other Mac continues to back up to the internal 500GB drive.
FYI, I'm proficient with building PCs so I have no issues swapping the internal hard drive if that's the best option. It's just that adding an external hard drive is a lot easier.

Based on the how-to articles I've read, it seems like you could remove the rubber pad without destroying it (if one is careful in removing it). That said, I think I'm going to just buy an external HDD and attach it to the TC. dchao99's comment about using an external HDD with his AEBS without issue helps alleviate some of the concerns I had with that option.
I was toying with buying a Drobo to attach to the TC but I'm pretty sure I'm just gonna get an external HDD like a Western Digital MyBook or something similar.

Macbook Pro hard drive space disappearing

I updated my OS to Mountain Lion when it came out, and have not had any issues, except for this. My hard drive space is disapperaring. After the updrade to Mountain Lion, I had close to 60 GB of free space on my hard drive, today I have about 47. Thing is, I haven't added anything to the hard drive, in fact, I've deleted a bunch of files. My Macbook is backed up to a 500 GB Time Capsule, and I have another 1 TB Time Capsule, where I store my media. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

Thank you for the info, but the Time Capsule isn't making snapshots. Here is what the storage is showing. I moved some pictures off of the hard drive, but they were there prior to the upgrade to Mountain Lion. Here is the screenshot with the storage breakdown...What would other be?

20Gb of Hard Drive space is unnacounted for

Something is consuming 20 GB of hard drive space on my basically out of the box 60Gb iBook G4 with Tiger that I can't account for. The only thing that's been added is MS Office and about 1Gb of files. The hardware profiler claims 39Gb used of 56Gb, but if I Get-Info on the hard drive or files on the drive they never add up to more than about 19Gb used. I tried WhatSize and it also confirms only about 19Gb used on the whole drive. Any suggesting how I can find out what's taking up the other 20Gb? How much space does the factory installation of Tiger take up?
Thanks in advance for any hints you can provide.

Are you using FileVault?
You can use WhatSize to see what files are taking up the space.

Where's my missing hard drive space?

I posted earlier about this, it may be a bit off topic but if anyone can offer a clue, I would appreciate it.
I got my win 7 upgrade and was waiting until vista started giving me headaches or the win7 service pack1 came out to upgrade...vista got me to upgrade today and I have to admit it was much less painful than i anticipated.
My question is about the missing hard drive space on my Idea center K230 on the box and on the side of the comp it claims a 640 HD (it claims in small print that up to 18gb may be used for the service partition) I questioned this when i first got it and even after deleting all the preloaded crap it was still saying 540 available out of 580GB....then I read that Lenovo has a huge partition for backup. So when I do my upgrade to win 7- 64 bit, I do a clean install and delete the smaller partition and reformat and expand the larger but before installing the new OS it says I have 596 available, so where the hell is the other 44GB of hard drive...did Lenovo rip us off and put 600GB hard drives in the K230's or is there a hidden partition still left that I cant find?
I am running everything off of my 596GB C: drive, I have my virus stuff and video card extras loaded, everything from the upgrade and 21 available patches and new drivers for most of my stuff....right now I am at at 575gb available and if i can ever find a printer driver that works I will create a backup point or disc from there, whatever win 7 allows. I never wanted the Lenovo one button back up and thought it was stupid to put a big glowing button on the keyboard that wipes your system back to when it came out of the box...I had nightmares of someone getting curious and going "what does this button do?"
.I notice I have a program files folder and a program files (x86) folder with a bunch of redundant files. what's the deal with this is Lenovo still hiding a backup program (maybe in that hidden partition?) that fills my hard drive twice as fast or is there a purpose for the file copies?
Any info on the above questions would be appreciated, and for those of you just looking for upgrade info I have good news, when you finally get your win7 upgrade disc it is the easiest windows installation ever, almost copmpletely automated, and very fast. So far the only sticking point is finding a printer driver, but I have 3 printers i can try, maybe one is supported.

Hi wise2u!
You can read all the details about how storage manufacturers use multiples of 1000 to measure disk space, and Windows reports it in multiples of 1024, and there is some overhead for Windows, or you can just use this rule of thumb from wikipedia:
A general rule of thumb to quickly convert the manufacturer's hard disk capacity to the standard Microsoft Windows formatted capacity is 0.93*capacity of HDD from manufacturer for HDDs less than a terabyte and 0.91*capacity of HDD from manufacturer for HDDs equal to or greater than 1 terabyte.
0.93 * 640GB = 595GB, which is about what you're seeing.
I don't work for Lenovo. I'm a crazy volunteer!

Adding hard drive space?

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