My MacBook Pro has
a 500GB hard drive. Although I only bought it in August, I’m already
being told that it’s full. I have the most recent version of Logic
Studio loaded onto it, along with the Snow Leopard operating system.
I also currently have some QuickTime files that I’m using for editing
that were converted from DVD to M4V format.I can’t believe that, even
using the machine for these sorts of applications, I’ve filled the hard
drive. I did free up a significant number of gigabytes simply by
emptying the Trash, but is there something that I need to run to clear
away some fluff files?
Also, I wonder if
I should move the movie files onto my G‑Tec 1TB drive, which I use for
Time Machine backups. Does this sound like a good idea?
Via SOS web site
SOS
contributor Mike Watkinson replies:
The latest version of Apple’s Logic
Studio, v9, has an install size of approximately 55GB, depending on
which options you tick while installing, and Snow Leopard, as installed
on your MacBook Pro, will be around the 8GB mark. Doubtless you have
other applications installed, but only software instruments like BFD2
are significant in this context (BFD2 is around 55GB for the full
installation). It’s important to remember that a hard drive with
a quoted size of 500GB will reveal itself to have only around 465GB of
space in Disk Utility. This is a result of a mathematical anomaly,
exploited by hard‑disk vendors, caused by the fact that there are 1024
bytes in a kilobyte, 1024kB in a MB, 1024 MB in a GB, and so on. Even
so, with Logic Studio installed, you should have at least 350GB.
Your
first, and simplest, port of call when checking used capacity on your
hard drive should be to access the ‘Info’ from your Finder’s File menu.
The movie files you mention could be part of
the issue. Ripping a DVD to QuickTime’s M4V format can create file sizes
of between 450MB and 1.2GB, depending on the length of the film. This
is relatively small in this context, but if you import to
a movie-editing application and choose to ‘optimise’ the file size on
import (for example, you can choose ‘Full Original Size’ from iMovie’s
‘Optimize the Video’ options when importing) this can increase the file
size by up to 10 times, so what was 1.2GB becomes 12GB. You would still
need to have more than 25 files of this size to fill up the available
space completely, though.
However, it is still
difficult to guess what might be the cause of the problem. It has been
reported that certain log files can grow in size, but certainly not to
the extent you describe. The first step in investigating would be to use
the Finder to help you identify large files. Movie files typically
reside in the Movie files folder in the Home folder, so you could start
by selecting the Home folder (make sure nothing else is selected) and
pressing Command‑I (or choosing ‘Get Info’ from the Finder’s File menu).
This will list the information for that file or folder. If it’s very
large, drill down into the Home folder until you find the rogue files.
It is important to remember that moving a file to the Trash does not
delete it from the hard drive. As you have discovered, you will only
reclaim the space when you empty the Trash!
If
this process sounds long‑winded (it can be!), I would recommend that you
use one of the available utilities to check the contents of your hard
drive. WhatSize (from www.whatsizemac.com)
has a Finder‑like interface that lists the size of every file on your
Mac. However, you may prefer a graphical view, in which case the free
GrandPerspective (fromwww.sourceforge.net) will analyse your disk and provide a pictorial representation of the relative size of all files.
DiskRadar (from www.diskradar.com)
is a new addition to this field and, although it isn’t free (the Lite
version sells for $12.95), as well as scanning your disk, it can show
you the largest files in sequential order, highlight rarely used files,
perform disk‑health diagnostics, and let you clean the disk up from
within the application. It is very fast compared with other options, and
the extra facilities make it well worth the money if you are keen to
keep track of hard-drive usage.
Moving the rogue files to another hard drive is
a good solution if you wish to keep working with them, but not if that
drive is set up as a Time Machine disk. You could partition the external
drive and use part of it as temporary storage, and part for Time
Machine backups, but given the relatively low cost of hard drives, it
might be better to invest in a separate external drive for video (and
audio) editing.
No comments:
Post a Comment