Hard Drive decreases in size after a few hours *use* for no reason

[svengoran]

Hi there

My iBook G4 has in total approx 1gb (of 60gb) of hard drive free. However, as time passes during *usage* i.e. NOTHING is downloaded in that period, the ibook thinks that it has less and less hard drive left - roughly every hour or so the Finder window tells me that there is roughly 200mb less hard drive available than there was an hour ago, having downloaded nothing and done nothing extraordinary other than have iTunes and firefox open in that period. The consequence is that after about 4-5 hours, the iBook thinks that the hard drive is full and I then have to reboot the computer, which at restart remembers the correct amount of hard drive free on the computer before doing the same thing again.

This has been happening for a while now but the hard drive used to decrease at a far slower rate i.e. over the course of a day. I think it may have something to do with the fact that a year ago or so I got into the bad habit of not shutting down for a week or even a fortnight at a time.

Does anyone know what I can do about this? I've tried MacJanitor, but that's as far as my novice knowledge takes me and it wasn't very effective for my problem

Thank you so much in anticipation

 

[tcbluejayfan]

Sounds like its a virtual memory issue where you probably need to leave a certain amount of space (i.e. 2-5gb) of hard drive space free.

 

[scathe]

yup, you probably don't have a whole lot of memory, so the computer cashes memory to the hard drive and when there is no hard drive left, it will be painfully slow .... you should definitely clear up some space

 

[Feeney96]

Before jumping to a hardware issue check out the console log files. When the machine has a hiccup it makes a note of a puts the info in the console. Sometimes it never stops and it will make a console file the size of your harddrive. This happen to my G5 and i ended up having mulitple console files over 20 gigs. A simple delete willl take care of this. Make sure to keep the most recent small console file just in case. Here's hoping it's nice and simple.

 

[bobtomay]

The issue has nothing to do with not shutting down the system. (Except as in regards to not having enough free space available on the drive for virtual memory. Re-starting clears the virtual memory which can help.)

Try to maintain at least 15-20% free space on any "system drive" is my personal recommendation (and I keep 25%). If you get under 10% free space, you're just asking for problems.

With less than 2% free space on your drive, you'll not solve this type of issue until you free up some space.

(Looking at your logs as noted by Feeney, is one area you might want to look for files that can be deleted. Also browser cache, cookies, history, etc. Typically these are not going to free up that much though.)

 

[walkerj]

I dunno, back when I had a G4 Mac Mini with only 256MB RAM I'd notice space on the drive decrease over time when I knew I didn't put anything there. Then software update would make me reboot or I'd for whatever reason log out then log back in I'd see upwards of 2 gigs suddenly available. Same with my Macbook but it has way more RAM and a way bigger HD.

 

[jamespickett]

I dunno, back when I had a G4 Mac Mini with only 256MB RAM I'd notice space on the drive decrease over time when I knew I didn't put anything there. Then software update would make me reboot or I'd for whatever reason log out then log back in I'd see upwards of 2 gigs suddenly available. Same with my Macbook but it has way more RAM and a way bigger HD.

Once your RAM is full, the computer uses "virtual Memory" (it writes whatever it needs to the hard drive instead of using memory)... When you are forced to RE-boot, it purges the data it has stored temporarily on your hard drive, freeing up the space again.

(this is why photoshop has a "scratch disk" option, so you can use an external hard drive or second internal and not the machines primary drive.)

To the gentelman that started the post... Buy an external, use it... I always used to leave at least 20-30 GB free on my HD "just in case"... these days everything goes on externals unless i am working on it right now. I've been using Macs for 15 years... and this has always been a problem.

 

[svengoran]

You've all been extremely helpful. It sounds as though my HD is simply too full. I've tried clearing stuff out but i think I'll just have to bite the bullet and get an external. Thanks so much everyone, you've been very generous in your advice. It is much appreciated