Way back in the day, storage on a Mac or PC was expensive on a per-megabyte or per-gigabyte basis. Then along came cheap and massive hard disk drives which changed everything. For awhile.
I just did a quick check on MacSales, my favorite online accessory store, and found a 1TB disk drive for just over $50, and a 4TB drive for less than $175, and a 6TB disk for just over $300. Storage today is cheap. But most Macs come with SSDs, which are smaller, faster, lighter, and much more expensive so we’re back to worrying about storage again.
Free Space Free
Today’s Mac notebooks, which constitutes the largest number of Macs sold each year, all are solid state drives (SSDs), which means lower storage capacity.
About the best you can hope to get into a Mac notebook these days is a measly 1TB SSD and you’ll pay a premium for it. Or, you can opt to keep what you’ve got, but free up some extra space for free.
Among the lengthy list of utilities which help to find and recover extra disk space is Disk Analyzer Pro, a free tool that shows you in graphic detail where and how space is being used.
That means you’ll see files you may not need, easily get rid of them, and get more space. For free. Click to start the search and Disk Analyzer Pro scans your Mac’s files and displays a convenient report.
Take a look.
What you’ll see right away is a list of the largest folders, their location on your Mac, and which ones can be deleted to free up some free space.
Disk Analyzer Pro has a built-in file explorer to make it easy to browse through files, starting with those that take up the most space. Search options abound, too. Find files by app, custom type, folder and subfolder, file size and date.
Trash what yo don’t need, keep what you must have. The only problems I’ve run into are not deal breakers, but worthy of consideration. Disk Analyzer Pro wouldn’t recognize my external FireWire disk drive (not a deal breaker because it’s just extra storage, not critical, and FireWire is a dying deal anyway). The second is knowing which files not to delete vs. which to keep. Disk Analyzer Pro helps, but there’s always a concern when deleting large batches of files.
Otherwise, it’s difficult to be free space.
