The mysterious “Other” area of the storage graph is gone, and there’s much more granularity about what’s using that space, including unexpected space hogs like GarageBand and iTunes backups of iOS devices.

The Storage tab in About this Mac has been redesigned for macOS Sierra to give you more information about what’s filling your drive. In macOS Sierra, you can activate Siri and ask it how much free space you’ve got. You can choose About This Mac from the Apple menu and click the Storage tab. If you select your drive from the Desktop or from the Computer window (Go: Computer or Command-Shift-C) and choose Get Info (Command-I)

If you’ve got Finder preferences set to show hard disks on the Desktop, you can turn on Show Item Info from the View Options panel (Command-J) If you’ve got the Status Bar turned on in the Finder (View: Show Status Bar or Command-slash), you’ll see it at the bottom of the window.MacOS displays the amount of free space on your drive in a few places, including: One of the biggest changes affects about how free space is calculated and displayed. The result is a whole raft of features in macOS Sierra that are all about freeing up more space on your drive.

It either isn’t necessary (log files, used app installers, and the like), or it’s just a duplicate of something that’s stored in the cloud. A lot of the stuff on our drives doesn’t need to be there. Maybe you used to never think about running out of space, and now every so often your Mac throws up that terrifying warning box that your disk is almost full.Īpple recognized this, too, and to its credit, it made this transition one of the main features of macOS Sierra. Instead of having a terabyte or two of disk space, maybe you’ve only got 250 or 500 GB.

But with the advent of solid-state drives, which are less prone to failure, dramatically faster, and more energy efficient than spinning hard drives, there came a tough transition. When free space isn’t free: Purgeable storage in macOS Sierraįor years, the storage inside our computers just kept increasing.

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