Hard drives can be added to Mac towers (Mac Pro, Power Mac) while you wait. For all other machines, we usually complete hard drive upgrades in one business day. This includes transferring all the data from the old drive so that your computer looks and works just like it did before, except that the hard drive has more free space. We recommend backing up your computer before you bring it in for any service, including hard drive upgrades.
Do I need a larger internal hard drive?
To see how much space you have left on your internal hard drive, click its icon on your desktop. 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 10% of your hard drive free for daily use. (For example, if you have a 200GB hard drive, you should keep about 20GB available.)
If you have less than 10% of your hard drive capacity remaining, you have a few choices:
- Remove extra applications and data from your hard drive (see instructions below)
- 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 Power Mac or Mac Pro, Tekserve can add additional internal hard drives to your computer while you wait (unless you already have the maximum number of hard drives installed)
How to remove extra files from your hard drive
If you have files that you don't use frequently, you can transfer them to an external hard drive or burn them onto CD/DVDs. (For really important files, you should do both. This is because external hard drives can fail and CD/DVDs can be damaged or lost.) After you've confirmed that the files are working from an external drive or CD/DVD, you can delete them from your hard drive. (Remember that moving files to the trash doesn't make more room - you also have to select Empty Trash from the Finder menu.)
Take your time and be careful to only delete what you intend to. Do not move or rename files that you didn't create. Mac OS X needs a lot of special files in special places, and it put them there already. Leave them be.
If you have a very large iTunes library you may want to get an external drive to store it all and free up space on your internal hard drive, check out Knowledge Base article 301748 from Apple.
An easy way to figure out what is taking up the most space on your drive is a cheap utility called What Size. It examines all the files on your computer and lets you see which are the largest.
How to remove extra applications from your hard drive
Make sure you have the original installation disks and installation codes for any applications you may want to run again. If you've downloaded any important applications online, it's a good idea to burn copies of the installation files to a CD or DVD just in case. Once you've confirmed that you have everything you need in case you want to run that application again, you can uninstall it.
Some applications have an uninstall utility, which is usually located in their Application folder. Applications that don't come with their own uninstall utility, will need to be removed manually. Drag the application's icon from the Applications folder to the trash. There are normally small support files and any files you created using the program left over. If there are preference files, support files, or a cache that the application has created, those will usually not be removed by deleting the application. You can check the application's website for uninstall instructions or use the cheap utility AppZapper.