How Much Free Drive Space Do I Need on my Mac?

About this Mac Storage Space
Free space as shown in the Storage tab in About this Mac. Screen shot courtesy of Coyote Moon, Inc.

Question: How Much Free Drive Space Do I Need?

What's the minimum amount of free drive space that I need? My Mac is starting to operate slowly, taking a long time to boot or to launch an application. It also seems unstable, sometimes giving me the rainbow cursor for very long periods of times, even locking up completely.

Do I need a bigger drive?


There are many different types of problems that can manifest the symptoms you describe.

Insufficient RAM or even hardware failure could be the culprit. But one of the most common causes of the problems you describe is not having enough free space on a startup drive.

Filling your startup drive until it's almost full is fraught with issues. First, your Mac needs some free space to use for creating swap space to manage memory use. Even when you have adequate RAM, OS X or the newer macOS will reserve some space at startup for memory swap space. In addition, individual applications usually use some disk space for temporary storage.

The point is that many pieces of the OS and many applications use drive space, usually without your being aware of it. When it gets your attention, it's usually because of erratic system performance.

In general, you should keep as much of your drive free as possible. If I had to put a minimum on the amount, I would say keep at least 15% of your startup drive free at all times; more is better.

If you're getting to the point where you worry about your drive's free space, it's probably time to either spring for a larger drive or archive some of the data and get it off the drive.

How Did You Come Up With 15% as a Bare Minimum?

I picked this value so that some basic OS X or macOS maintenance scripts will have sufficient free drive space to run.

This includes the operating systems built-in disk defragmentation system, memory swap space, and enough space to create cache and temp files when your Mac starts up, while still leaving room for basic applications, such as email and web browsers, to use free space as needed.

Free Up Disk Space

To free up disk space, start by selecting a target location for offloading data. You can copy files to another drive, burn them to CDs or DVDs, place them on a USB flash drive, store them in the cloud, or in some cases, simply delete the files. I always look to my Downloads folder first, because it tends to collect a lot of files and I tend to forget to delete them as I go along. After that, I check my Documents folder for old and outdated files. Do I really need to store my 8-year-old tax files on my Mac? Nope. Next, I look at my Pictures, Movies, and Music folders. Any duplicates in there? There always seems to be.

Once I go through my home folder and all of its sub-folders, I check the available free space. If I'm not above the minimum, then it's time to consider additional storage options, either a larger hard drive or an additional drive, probably an external drive for storing data files.



What About SSDs? Do They Need More Free Space?

Yes, they may, but it depends on the specific architecture of the SSD you're using. Generally speaking, SSDs need a large amount of free space to allow the SSD's controller to perform garbage collection, the process of resetting blocks of data so they may be used again.


Coming up with a percentage to leave free on an SSD is difficult because the SSD architecture plays a role. Some manufacturers will over-provision (OP) an SSD model, that is, the SSD will have more storage space available than what the SSD is sold as having. The OP space isn't available to the end user but is used by the SSD controller during garbage collection, and as spare data blocks that can be swapped in should a block of data in the general use area of the SSD fail.

Other SSD models will have little if any, OP space. So, as you can see, coming up with a free space percentage is tough to do. However, the usual percentage bandied about ranges from 7% to 20%.

The amount of free space needed is very dependent on how you use your SSD. I recommend 15% for general use, which assumes that you're using TRIM or an equivalent system to assist in garbage collection.

Originally Published: 8/19/2010

Updated history: 7/31/2015, 6/21/2016