storage problem

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hello,
i'm p3ris and i'm new in this forum, i'm having a problem with my macbook.
i have about 500Mb free space in my laptop's hard disk, and when i use transmission and start downloading torrent files my diks's free space is getting smaller and smaller.
for example if i have 500Mb free space after 10 hours of using transmission then i have no free space at all, although i haven't save my files in my hard disk but i save them in an external hard dik.
does anyone has any ideas ???
thnx
 
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You need a lot more than 500 mb of free space, the Macs swap files may grow depending on what you are doing. You should have at least 10-20% free space on your boot disk
 
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p3ris
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lab. reeted

ok with this but i have one more question.
i have deleted many Gb from my macbook so i wouldn't have this problem.
more than 3 Gb have been deleted from my mackbook and when i used programms the same story started again and after few hours i had no more free space. so these 3 Gb that where free where are they now??
i want to say that this free space must have been captured...
or not?
 
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You do really man 500MB free space?

Wonder the poor old thing even boots and it must be awfully slow. Pop in a larger HDD>
 
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p3ris
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i didn't have 500Mb free space it was an example, but since i have this problem my free space is less than 500 Mb....
what's the HDD?
 

CrimsonRequiem


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HDD is your Hard Drive. You said that you deleted 3GB of data but did you empty your trash can?
 
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yes, i did...
 

Slydude

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If you only deleted 3 GB of space it's possible that you still don't have enough space. Even if the files you are downloading are stored on an external drive applications that are running usually store temporary files on your boot/startup drive.

The OS will also store temporary information there if it has not been used in a while especially if several apps are open at once. How many apps do you have open when this is happening? Also, how much memory (ram not hard drive space) does your Mac have?
 
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If you only deleted 3 GB of space it's possible that you still don't have enough space. Even if the files you are downloading are stored on an external drive applications that are running usually store temporary files on your boot/startup drive.

The OS will also store temporary information there if it has not been used in a while especially if several apps are open at once. How many apps do you have open when this is happening? Also, how much memory (ram not hard drive space) does your Mac have?

it has 4Gb RAM.
this happens when i start my mac and use about 3-4 apps, i-tunes,transmission and safari (most of the times).
can u answer me please, which files are stored in this free space since i'm not creating new files, i save them in an external hard drive, and i boot safari from my external hard drive...?
 

Slydude

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I'm sure someone else can give a more thorough answer but these files are mainly "swap files". Let's use Safari as an example but the same is true for other programs. When a program is opened the data that it needs to operate is loaded into any free memory (ram) that's available. As other programs are opened, and load there data into ram, there is less free space. Since the OS needs some "free" (open) memory to operate well it writes data that has not been used recently to the hard drive. The data is still available for programs to use but it is on the hard drive until requested or the program in question, in this case Safari, is shut down.

These "swap files" are invisible to the user under most circumstances. They are generally stored on the "boot" drive and can vary considerably in size. The less memory (ram) you have the more likely it is that programs will need to write "swap files" to the hard drive. Four GB f ram is probably sufficient for most tasks though.

Here's a question though. When you first boot your Mac and the Finder and Dock are the only thing opens how much free space does the Finder say that your hard drive has? If you have recently deleted 3 GB of stuff and emptied the trash the number should be somewhere near 3 GB or more unless one of the programs is not cleaning up after itself well.
 

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I doubt anyone here is expert enough to know what all files the system puts there, nor how to stop them all. Among other things it uses Virtual Memory (the swap files sly has mentioned) and will create a temp file for sleep mode.

Bottom line, you're not going to get a responsive system, nor one that is not running out of space without freeing up a minimum of 10-20% of the space on the drive. Even the few that don't espouse this particular amount of free space claim that OS X needs a minimum of 10-12GB free space to operate properly.

Over and above that, when you're down to a minimal amount of free space, it may not be only a matter of no free space, but also a matter of not enough free contiguous space on the drive for some write operations the OS may need to perform.
 
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so the conclusion is to have about 12 Gb of free space in my mac...
thnk u all!!
 
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Back to my old 2.2GHz C2D MB after selling my MBP and wondering what my next Mac will be :)
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That first Hitachi drive you linked to is the one I just bought last week and put in my MBP on Friday. Been working like a charm (granted it's only been 3 days). It's quiet and speedy. My fans even run cooler now. I'm very pleased with it and it only took about 25-30 minutes to swap and load my cloned drive from an external.
 

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