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How much HD space did Snow Leopard free up for you?

post #1 of 17
8/30/09 at 5:07am
Thread Starter 
I kept reading that Snow Leopard had a much smaller HD foot print than Leopard did, and that upon installation it would free up to as much as 7 gigs of space.

This I thought sounded awesome as I am constantly looking for more space on my internal hard drive.

Pre install I had 21.47 gigs available. After install it had jumped to 35.28

That's almost 14 gigs! Double the oft-mentioned amount.

Did anyone else see hard drive increases of this, or more even, amount?
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post #2 of 17
8/30/09 at 7:28am
Quote:
Originally Posted by iDunno View Post

I kept reading that Snow Leopard had a much smaller HD foot print than Leopard did, and that upon installation it would free up to as much as 7 gigs of space.

This I thought sounded awesome as I am constantly looking for more space on my internal hard drive.

Pre install I had 21.47 gigs available. After install it had jumped to 35.28

That's almost 14 gigs! Double the oft-mentioned amount.

Did anyone else see hard drive increases of this, or more even, amount?

Check out this thread from post six onwards. Also read this and this.

Apple has changed they way they calculate file sizes and disk space, so now when they say GB, they mean GB (1,000,000,000 Bytes), whereas before they said GB but they were actually GiB (1073741824 Bytes).

What this means is that whilst Apple have reduced the amount of space consumed by the OS, the "new maths" also makes it look like you've got more free space than before. For example, get an external disk and see how much space 10.5 says is free, then take the disk and mount it in 10.6. The data on the disk will not have changed in any way, but Snow Leopard will report more GB space free. That's because 10.5 is wrong (as are all previous versions of Mac OS and all versions of Windows and many distros of Linux), and 10.6 is right.
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post #3 of 17
8/30/09 at 7:46am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. H View Post

Check out this thread from post six onwards. Also read this and this.

Apple has changed they way they calculate file sizes and disk space, so now when they say GB, they mean GB (1,000,000,000 Bytes), whereas before they said GB but they were actually GiB (1073741824 Bytes).

The 7% or so difference does not account for the prev. posters nearly double amount of disk space saved.
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post #4 of 17
8/30/09 at 9:06am
OK, he started with 21.47 GiB free space. Now, he's got 35.28 GB = 32.86 GiB free.

So Snow Leopard has saved him an impressive 11.39 GiB or 12.23 GB.
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post #5 of 17
8/30/09 at 12:47pm
Somehow, I went from 414gb to 439gb available.

I was amazed, considering my friends mac pro didn't get any more than 7 or 8.
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post #6 of 17
8/30/09 at 2:19pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by iDunno View Post

I kept reading that Snow Leopard had a much smaller HD foot print than Leopard did, and that upon installation it would free up to as much as 7 gigs of space.

This I thought sounded awesome as I am constantly looking for more space on my internal hard drive.

Pre install I had 21.47 gigs available. After install it had jumped to 35.28

That's almost 14 gigs! Double the oft-mentioned amount.

Did anyone else see hard drive increases of this, or more even, amount?


I did a clean install on a completely new / blank hard disk no OS present on it.
The OS by it's self with the Rossetta and QT7 optional installs (not very large file sizes) took total volume usage to 10.57GB.

This was before Installed my other applications

Graeme
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post #7 of 17
8/30/09 at 5:48pm
I got 18GB on one machine and 26 on another. I am sure the new math had something to do with it, but there were also real gains in space as well. Good on Apple for taking the lead in changing to a meaningful measuring system.
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post #8 of 17
8/31/09 at 4:05am
i got 12 gigs free from SL
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post #9 of 17
8/31/09 at 1:49pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by xgrewellx View Post

Somehow, I went from 414gb to 439gb available.

I was amazed, considering my friends mac pro didn't get any more than 7 or 8.

Maybe his system maintenance is (was) better than yours (under Leopard), so that he already had a leaner, meaner system than you. Which left less to be apparently 'regained' by Snow Leopard.
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post #10 of 17
8/31/09 at 3:01pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rokcet Scientist View Post

Maybe his system maintenance is (was) better than yours (under Leopard), so that he already had a leaner, meaner system than you. Which left less to be apparently 'regained' by Snow Leopard.


We figured it out, Snow Leopard is now using base 10. My main hdd is 640 gigs and once it converted to base 10 it "freed" up a bunch of space. His OS drive is small, so it didn't free up as much.
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post #11 of 17
8/31/09 at 3:16pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by xgrewellx View Post

We figured it out, Snow Leopard is now using base 10. My main hdd is 640 gigs and once it converted to base 10 it "freed" up a bunch of space. His OS drive is small, so it didn't free up as much.

[sarcasm]Really, you figured it out?[/sarcasm] I guess you didn't get as far as reading the second post of this thread before you posted in it?

In fact, when you run the maths on the numbers you provided, it looks like Snow Leopard is using more disk space than Leopard, which is odd. Did you have a really stripped-back Leopard install and had you also used a utility such as monolingual on it?
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post #12 of 17
9/1/09 at 2:29pm
I got 17 GB back on a MacBook Pro, and 9 GB back on a MacBook.
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post #13 of 17
9/1/09 at 4:01pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Graeme View Post

I did a clean install on a completely new / blank hard disk no OS present on it.
The OS by it's self with the Rossetta and QT7 optional installs (not very large file sizes) took total volume usage to 10.57GB.

This was before Installed my other applications

Graeme

Did you install the language packs? My clean install was way under that.
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post #14 of 17
9/1/09 at 5:10pm
Was reciting from memory on the after free space (was at work).

Just checked and I now have 464 gigs
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post #15 of 17
9/1/09 at 5:16pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by aplnub View Post

Did you install the language packs? My clean install was way under that.

Hi- i didn't customize the language packs at all- left as default. only opted for the extra QT7 and Rosetta as they are not part of standard install.

Left the other default options on too-i.e. printer support 1.5 GB (not all printer options suggested), additional Fonts 108mb, Language support 1.1GB and X11 151MB

Don't mind having language packs on my machine- as they can come in handy- my full install with all apps & app support content is over 120GB- and my internal MBP disk is 500GB so im not lacking space!

am just running SL as a test system at present- As it's not compatible yet with what i do- QT X looks promising but it's not there yet so needed QT7- but all in all 10.6 looks like a sensible upgrade and will be good to use in the future i.e 10.6.2!

Guess it's possible to just have a 7.5GB base system- but I wanted the works to test compatibility.

and as i said i have found some problems so glad it's just a test system!

Graeme
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post #16 of 17
12/24/12 at 11:41am

I came across this thread via google search "snow leopard freed up disc space" I went from 47GB free to 93 GB free!!! WHen I first saw this I thought the worst had happened, Like WHAT has been deleted? Its just weird. I am a computer idiot and have no idea as to what could free up that much. Good news is that everything seems OK so far 24 hours after my upgrade. Any ideas? \

 

Thanks

Ron

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post #17 of 17
12/24/12 at 11:44am
Originally Posted by plastermaster View Post
Any ideas?

 

Mac OS 1 to Leopard reports gibibytes as gigabytes. Snow Leopard and onward reports gigabytes as gigabytes. That (visual), plus the removal of pre-Intel hardware support (actual), frees up quite a bit.

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