Hi Gary, Just adding to my first reply and Daniel’s reply. From what you mentioned below, I would suggest it is important that you replace this hard drive for a much larger drive, ASAP. You are already risking corruption of files.
In one of my posts to another WAMUG member some time ago that had a hard drive with not enough free space and was experiencing Finder Corruption because of this. A hard drive that fills up and turns flaky is nearly impossible to get back to normal without Erasing reformatting. If you run Photoshop it is best to have 100GB of free space. If all you were doing is Microsoft Word and email, I would keep a minimum of 50 GB free unused space available, this allows the operating system vital unused space to write its swap files, virtual memory scratch disk. "The operating system also needs to use the hard drive for temporary storage as you work. It creates what's known as virtual memory on your hard drive, accessing it constantly." Full hard drives also tend to fragment system and data files and greatly slow disk access down, too. Left unchecked, the problem will likely spread and corrupt the entire install until the hard drive literally won't mount or the computer won't boot or run without constant crashing. Cheers, Ronni On 22/03/2011, at 11:31 AM, Daniel Kerr wrote: > > hi Gary > > As Ronni has pointed out, wouldn't hurt to get a larger drive. > Drive pricing is pretty good at the moment for MacPro's and considering they > can take 4 hard drives in total, well worth it! > You can get some 1TB or 2TB drives for not a lot. They even have a 3TB drive > now, but it's still fairly pricing. > It's just the cloning part that can be fun. > > Kind Regards > Daniel > > Sent from my iPhone > > --- > Daniel Kerr > MacWizardry > > Phone: 0414 795 960 > Email: <wamug @ macwizardry . com . au> > Web: <http://www.macwizardry.com.au> > > > **For everything Macintosh** > > On 22/03/2011, at 10:20 AM, Ronda Brown wrote: > >> >> >> On 22/03/2011, at 10:08 AM, gary dorn wrote: >> >>> >>> Howdy >>> >>> My MacPro 2.66, 3GB RAM, Mac OS 10.5.8 , a 500 GB harddisk , says it has >>> only 17Gb left. >>> >>> In the past week, its been getting spinning ball of death, which meant I >>> have had to force restart. >>> Usually occurs when I have a number of Pages, Numbers and PDFs open and I >>> go to open a 3D imaging software ( google earth, BoA etc) >>> >>> Is this a sign I need to get another Hard disk? >> >> Hi Gary, >> >> Yes, for sure. A hard Drive running with only 17GB Free space, is lucky to >> be running at all. >> >> If your drive is too full, performance is affected dramatically. >> You need to keep at least 15%-20% of your total hard drive space free for >> the operating system to use for optimal performance. >> >> Cheers, >> Ronni >> >> 17" MacBook Pro Intel Core i7 >> 2.66GHz / 8GB / 1067 MHz DDR3 / 500GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200rpm >> >> OS X 10.6.6 Snow Leopard >> Windows 7 Ultimate (under sufferance) >> >> -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:[email protected]>
