I just got a message that my “startup disk is almost full.”

Think of your hard drive as a file cabinet. If you jam-pack your file cabinets, it creates clutter and crowding, which can make reaching in to grab the correct file a slower task.

"Startup disk is almost full" means that you are running out of space on your hard drive, and it's making your Mac run slowly. Macs usually only have one hard disk drive, and that is the startup drive.

To see how much space you have left on your internal hard drive, select its icon on your desktop. (If you don't see the hard disk icon, choose Finder > Preferences, click General and then select Hard Disks.) Then go to the File menu and choose Get Info. The info window will show your hard drive's capacity and available gigabytes. We recommend that you leave about 10 GB of your hard drive free for daily use.

If you have less than 10 GB of your hard drive's capacity remaining, you have a few choices:

• Remove extra applications and/or remove extra data from your hard drive.
• Purchase external hard drive(s) to provide additional storage space for your files.
• Have Tekserve upgrade your computer to a larger internal hard drive (usually completed in one business day). If you have a Mac Pro, Tekserve can add additional internal hard drives to your computer while you wait you already have the maximum number of hard drives installed).

Published March 24, 2009 12:00 PM
Last modified on November 25, 2011 1:24 PM