Need to solve Out of Storage Space on IMAC

[alainr]

My 2013 imac running El Capitan 10.11.6 is out of storage. It has a 1TB internal hard drive and has only 3GB free. Most of it is Other and Photos. i've deleted what i could. Interesting that when i delete from Photos, it is the yellow "Other" that decreases in size.

For work, i export certain photos from PHOTOS and save as files on my mac and then use photoshop.

I am thinking about getting a second 2TB external hard drive (in addition to my 2TB hard drive that i use for Time Machine) and put everything on it--so use it instead of my internal hard drive.

Is that a good idea or do you recommend doing something else?

 

[Fishrrman]

3gb is not "enough free space". The OS is going to "bog down" trying to run within it.

Moreover, if the internal drive is a platter-based hard drive, it's probably become quite fragmented by now (the "free space" as well as the files themselves), and could stand a good defragging.

If you really want to see better performance, you need TWO external drives:
1. An external BOOT SSD (to hold the OS, apps, and stripped-down user account)
and
2. A second large-capacity external drive (could be platter-based) to hold things like movies, music, photos.

If you throw out enough stuff on the internal drive you could probably do well with just the external boot SSD....