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Check Your Hard Disk
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Check Remaining Hard Disk Capacity
I remember in my old Windows day, I regularly check for my remaining hard disk capacity, just because I was too poor to have high-end hard disk. Now, we've large capacity of hard disk drive, making us overlook the need of checking remaining hard disk capacity.
To check on remaining hard disk capacity as well as used hard disk space, you can do the following steps:
- Go to Your Desktop
- Select your Hard Disk Icon
- Control-Click and select Get Info (keystrokes: Command-I)
- Expand the General section by clicking on the triangle next to the wording
Find Missing Hard Disk Icon
Perhaps after tweaking around with your Mac, you can't find your hard disk anywhere on Desktop. If you want to make it appear again on your Desktop, you can do the following:
- Open Finder
- Open Finder → Preferences… (keystrokes Command-Comma)
- Go under General section
- Check the Hard Disks checkbox
Now you can find your hard disks icon on desktop. It's that simple.
Check Total Number of Files
Have you ever tried to count how many number of files stored into your Hard Disk? Will they possible be millions of them? Let's see.
- Open new Finder window
- Go to Applications folder (keystrokes: Command-A)
- Find Utilities folder and open Disk Utility from inside there
- Select your Hard Disk (eg. Macintosh HD)
- At the bottom part of the pane, see your number of folders and number of files stored
I have 223,174 folders and 1,298,849 files currently stored in my hard disk. This is cool.
Anyway, you can rename your Hard Disk name with exactly the same way as you rename your files/folders.
Anticipate Hard Disk Failure
S.M.A.R.T. or Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology is a monitoring system to help you anticipate any potential failures on your hard disk. It's better to check it regularly, in case you need to rescue some important documents inside your hard disk.
- Under your Disk Utility, choose your Hard Disk Product Name (eg. 74.5GB ST98823AS Media)
- See S.M.A.R.T. Status on the lower part of the pane
- If it's stated there Verified then your hard disk is working properly
- If you find it's stated there Failing, then you need to do your backup as soon as possible and find the replacement for the drive
- Don't shut down your computer if the S.M.A.R.T. status is failing. I doubt it will run properly on the next booting up
Categories:
Tips and Tricks
Tags:
Desktop,
Hard Disk,
Hardware
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5 Comments
Alex
I have 869,174 files! haha it's a fun thing to find out! I just love your site, wendy, this really brings out the fun of using a mac, instead of all those rumors and 3rd-party apps... Keep up the good work! :D
Jacarepagua
Funny, I've got 777.777 files. Do I win some kind of mac freaky prize with that?
Wendy
Woah, that's pretty cool! So if you've accidentally created one more file, don't forget to delete one unused file. So the numbers still freaking sevens :)
JCS
The optimal way to find out how much disk space is left is to do a "command (apple/cloverleaf) + J" which will bring up your desktop/finder item view preferences. You then can choose to "Show item info" with a check box. The info will show up under the drive icon and list the drive/partition size and the remaining space. It will also tell you how many items you have in a folder. The only problem I've had (with Tiger) is that if you empty the trash of some big item, the drive space info will not update unless you do a "Relaunch" of the Finder via a "command + option + escape" key combo. I have Leopard on a different partition on my computer and use it from time to time to load system updates or if my Tiger partition has an issue and I can't start up from it.
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Nice article, keeping your disks in shape is very important!
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