-
Internal Drive Space
Hello,
I’m sorry if this is a redundant post but I did a couple searches and couldn’t quite find an equivalent question. Here’s my issue:
I was lazy and put a ton of RAW image files, video clips, and music on my MacBook Pro’s internal drive (500GB drive). The drive got to be over 90% full (less than 20GB available). I know this is a no-no on a startup drive. What I’ve heard is that there is something to do with where the computer stores the data as it gets more and more full. I have now moved a lot of the data to external drives and the drive is only a little more than 70% full. I’m still working to eliminate as much other stuff from the internal drive as possible. I’ve heard 50% full is good.
Anyway: if the actual location on the computer is the important thing about performance issues when the startup drive is full, is there a utility that I can use to rearrange the data on my drive?
Is this defragmenting? I know I did that on an old Dell laptop I used years back.
Will I be okay now that I’ve just moved a bunch of the media to externals?
Thanks,
Stef -
2 Replies
-
– What I’ve heard is that there is something to do with where the computer stores the data
Unix systems guarantee that the first write will be in a contiguous area. If you don’t have enough free space the filesystem will either have to move files around or (worse) give a filesystem full error. Generally as long as there is 15% free it’s not going to be a problem.
– is there a utility that I can use to rearrange the data on my drive?
There are several:
Finder (GUI)
tar (command line)
mv (command line)– Is this defragmenting?
No. Defragmenting is different. There are utilities that can defragment a Mac, but they seldom need to be used because of the way Unix filesystems operate.
– Will I be okay now that I’ve just moved a bunch of the media to externals?
Yes.
-
Thank you,
Stef
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up