Tips to Reclaim Hard Disk Space in Mac OS X

To maintain performance of your system you need to free up some space in your drive. So, it is necessary to keep checking your hard drive status. When your Mac drive gets closer to its capacity, it affects Mac performance considerably. In this situation, in addition to your actual RAM, OS X also uses your Mac disk as Virtual memory. The insufficient RAM is the main cause for an extremely lethargic Mac. But, before increasing RAM you could try few of space saving tips mentioned below.

Clear unnecessary files from Mac disk:

Clean unnecessary cache files, log files, language files, duplicate files, universal binaries etc. for reclaiming space occupied by all clutters. Remove unnecessary language files resources by downloading Stellar Speed Up Mac. This would recover up to half gigabyte of disk space on hard disk and speedup your Mac performance.

Re-index by Spotlight:

Spotlight is the feature that automatically indexes all the files, contents of your Mac drive in early hours of each morning. But, if you turn your Mac off at night, Spotlight can’t have had a chance to re-index.

So, prevent causing unresponsiveness and performance issues, one should use Spotlight to force it to re-index. By clicking- open System Preferences, then click “Spotlight” and after that choose “Privacy” tab.

For re-index any volume, Click the “+” icon and choose your desired volume you want to re-index. After few minutes remove that volume by “-” icon. By this way, Spotlight will re-index the volume.

Memory even less than system requirement:

According to system requirement of Apple’s Mountain lion, 8 GB of disk space is needed for its installation. However, if your Mac is running out of space then you might figure out a significant degradation in its performance. It will become worse if you’ve low memory too, as your system may not have enough disk space to use it as virtual memory, thus problem arises.

So, you must have the required amount of free space available in drive. And you should think over that, do you really have enough disk space for storing applications, movies, photos, OS X and more..?

The more apps you’ve installed the more disk space is consumed. The more files your Mac has the longer it take to find files, index them (for Spotlight).

So, the lesson here is to make sure that you have possibly archived your old files to an external disk, compress them or simply delete the stuff you don’t need anymore or rarely used, uninstall files before deleting them etc.