Since a good rule of thumb is to have 5% to 10% of your storage capacity available for system functions for smooth operation of your Mac – that means keeping 12GB free on a 128 GB MacBook Air. As a result many of us are opting for smaller capacity drives to gain the benefits of flash technology – or in the case of MacBook Airs, flash drives are the only option. For example, a new iMac with 1TB of flash storage costs $1,000 more than one with a traditional magnetic hard drive.

The fact is that despite a significant drop in cost, a flash drive of comparable capacity to a magnetic drive is still incredibly expensive. Thanks so much, Grand Perspective.With the advent of flash storage many of us have sacrificed storage capacity for speed, battery life and a low-profile form factor. In one hour, I freed up over 60 GB of space on my hard drive. Some of the other large boxes were large downloads or applications I haven’t touched in months. For one of the virtual machines, I disposed of old snapshots I didn’t need any more. Using this heatmap, I was quickly able to identify the files and folders that were hogging my disk space and eliminate them. The entire left side of the heat map, representing over 50% of my drive space, is taken up by VMWare Fusion Virtual Machines. As you can see, I have some mammoth stuff going on. The larger the rectangle, the larger the file. Eriban applies it to the files and folders on your hard drive to identify what’s taking up the most space.įor example, here’s a scan of my hard disk: GrandPerspective employs a heat map, an amazing visual tool I first experienced in the financial industry to show volume, market cap, industry, and movement of stocks in a market.

Luckily, some genius named “eriban” wrote a donation-only program called GrandPerspective. I wasn’t able to install Apple’s mammoth iPad SDK on my two-year old MacBook Pro because I was out of hard drive space. Computer Spa Day, which we talked about before (for both mobile and regular computers), will save you time and money.

Mac hard drive space