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The boilerplate recommendation from authorities that do address this issue is to keep at least 10 percent of your hard drive free, and I would suggest more than that if your drive is of smaller capacity than 40 gigabytes and you're running OS X. I prefer to have at least 3.5 to 4 gigabytes free on my OS X boot volume after a fresh restart, which is more like 20 percent of the space on my iBook's 20 gigabyte drive.
The this provision seems like common sense if you have a vague (like me) or better conception of how the Unix operating system works, but it would probably never occur to a lot of non tech-erudite Mac users.
An eMac-owning friend of mine for instance, who emailed me saying that her computer had started throwing up error dialogs such as:
Your startup disk is almost full.
You need to make more space available on your startup disk by deleting files.
Warning: Your hard disk has no more space available for application memory. Further Application disk actually may have been suspended.
Now this lady has been an intensive computer user for years, through two successive G3 iMacs and lately this eMac, but she is essentially technologically illiterate, and does virtually no system or disk maintenance on her own. It is testimony to the robust forgivingness of the Mac OS and Apple hardware that she gets along quite well most of the time, although her computer would work even better with a little TLC, but I digress.
Anyway, "How full is your hard drive?" I asked. She emailed back this report:
Macintosh HD:
Capacity: 37.27 GB
Available: 2.01 GB
That removed any mystery as to why her system and applications had been protesting. The 40 gigabyte hard drive was essentially bung-full. My friend has a digital camera, and shoots lots of pictures, and I'll wager that a lot of digital photographers are in the same boat with overflowing hard disks, especially if they own an older Mac.
in my friend's case, the solution was very simple. She has an 80 gigabyte external FireWire hard drive, and I advised her to just offload some of her photograph files to it and then trash them from her eMac's hard drive.
Indeed, it would be a very good idea to back up her entire hard drive to the FireWire drive, and also to back up any photos that she really values to CDs or other backup media. A hard drive failure can occur without warning, and would in her case be devastating. Few of us back up as frequently and comprehensively as we should, but that's a topic for another day.
To find out how full your hard drive is, just select "Get Info" from the Finder's File Menu, or use the "Command I" keyboard shortcut, and this sort of dialog will appear, showing the capacity of the drive (or partition as in this case), and how much free space is available. Free space will be greater after a fresh restart.
If the free space is less than 2.5 GB or 10 percent of the total drive capacity, and you're running OS X, it's time to offload some stuff to other media and free up more drive space so the operating system can breath freely.
Charles W. Moore
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