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Hardrive almost full!

D

doctor pangloss

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 30, 2004
161
0
Thailand
Between my music library and all the software and a few photos my 60G hard drive in my PB is getting near being full.

Can I delete programs like I-chat and garage band to free up space?
I just ordered a 250G Lacie drive to store stuff on.
Should I just move them to the Lacie drive?

The 60G seems small. The applications are huge these days.
It wasn't long ago when a 250 megabyte hardrive was cutting edge! 14 years doesn't seem that long to me anyway!

Also are there reliability issues when you start nearing the hard drive capacity?
 
Applespider

Applespider

macrumors G4
Jan 20, 2004
10,939
1
looking through rose-tinted spectacles...
Yes. You can delete Garageband (gives you back a couple of GBs IIRC) etc. I dumped things like iDVD for Mum since I know she'll never use it. It's also worth checking out Delocaliser which will get rid of languages that you don't use. You might also be able to dump some of the printer drivers etc.

If you use iPhoto, check that the trash is empty in there (it uses a separate Trash) since you may find lots of old images in there that you no longer want. If you don't mind losing your original images, you can also use iPhoto Diet to get rid of them.

You could dump them onto the LaCie drive to keep copies of them (although they'll be on your Restore discs anyhow) but I'm not sure they'll run from there.

And yes, get below about 10% of the drive and you'll start having performance issues in OS X, especially if you also have low RAM, since there won't be anywhere for virtual memory to go.
 
rainman::|:|

rainman::|:|

macrumors 603
Feb 2, 2002
5,438
2
iowa
Definitely run Delocalizer, it strips all non-english (it's customizable, so you can leave some in) languages from both the OS and any localized programs you have installed... on average it seems to save about 1.5-2gbs for me from a fresh install of all my stuff.
 
stoid

stoid

macrumors 601
Feb 17, 2002
4,312
29
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
wordmunger said:
Just delete the Garageband app from your applications folder. Also delete the Garageband folder from your Music folder.
Click to expand...

IIRC, GarageBand also installs it's loops in one of the Library/Application Support folders either in your user or in the root drive. And that's the majority of the space it uses.
 
wordmunger

wordmunger

macrumors 603
Sep 3, 2003
5,124
3
North Carolina
stoid said:
IIRC, GarageBand also installs it's loops in one of the Library/Application Support folders either in your user or in the root drive. And that's the majority of the space it uses.
Click to expand...

Oops! My bad. Yep, that'll get you another 1.8 gigs back!
 
Kelmon

Kelmon

macrumors 6502a
Mar 28, 2005
733
0
United Kingdom
lilstewart92 said:
Never heard of that:confused:
Click to expand...

Actually, as per a posting that I made a bit earlier tonight, I experience this at the moment. Once I have copied a lot of files to my disk, then gradually moved them to a remote server via UNIX I find that the resultant space is much less than what I started with but a reboot seems to sort the situation out.

Aparently this phenomenon may just be caused by a slow Finder update so the jury is still out on this one as far as I am concerned.
 
Toe

Toe

macrumors 65816
Mar 25, 2002
1,101
2
stridey said:
Also, although it may pain you, try rebooting. I find that when I reboot (rarely), the OS shows as much as a GB of new free space.
Click to expand...
Rebooting clears out caches that the system was using. To do a more thorough job, try Tiger Cache Cleaner. That also lets you clear out older log files, which can take up quite a bit of room.
 
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