18Gig Install?
 

I bought a new MacBook today & noticed the install itself took up 18Gigs of HD space? Can that be right?

~/Users/me is 23G and "df -h" says 41G is used total.

Sure that could be right.. the iLife stuff takes up loads of disk sapce.
Check out /Library/Application Support/. Mine is 4GB alone.

~ is a reference to your own home directory, so adding /Users/me is incorrect, unless you've created a Users/me/ hierarchy within your own home directory (~/) and are referenceing it for some reason, it should be ~/ or /Users/me/.. but anyway..


EDIT: nevermind I get it now.

Best way to find out would be to check that before you transfer/load all of your files. You may have a large number of duplicate apps/etc.
But, iLife '06 by itself installs about 8 or 9 GB.

You will also find that removing all the foreign language support files would get back close to 4 GB.

What folders do you have at the root of the HDD (eg: Applications, Library, System, Users)? Are there any others beside those 4?

The 3rd-party utilities "OmniDiskSweeper" and "Disk Inventory X" will help show you where the disk space is going.

Alternatively, open a Terminal window (Terminal is under /Applications/Utilities) and enter the following command:
sudo du -h -d 1 /
Look to see which sub-folder is taking up the most space and repeat with that folder. If you have trouble interpreting the results, just copy & paste them back here and we can help.
(This method will work in cases where the above 3rd-party utilities fail to show where the disk space is going - i.e. the case where the files are in folders that you don't have permission to read.)

ummm yeah, a lot
 

Yup:

Much of the extra bloat seems to come from samples in iLife, like GarageBand audio samples. And printer drivers for printers you don't own.

Last time I checked, a long time ago, a default OS X install took up more disk space than a Windows XP install. I wonder what the difference is now. Makes it hard to convince people that XP is bigger bloatware.

I think solipsism was asking what you see BEFORE you change settings. All except the 4 mentioned are invisible, by default.
Best time to evaluate the installed size would be before you transferred apps and files to your new system, which you have obviously already done. The size of the system and other folders would be inflated as a result.

Ok, but 18Gs? How much would changing some settings affect /? Not -that- much.

I asked because if the OP had done an Archive and Install the Previous System Folder would be taking up a great deal of space. This issue got the best of me at one point and so i tend to ask ask it. Per the data given in this thread it is clear that is not the issue. I hope that one day someone else claims to have encountered this problem and I can end my lonely struggle as the only person to not notice the the huge Previous System Folder taking up valuable HDD space.

No, changing settings doesn't change how much space is used, but there's seldom a reason for displaying all the hidden folders.
Of course, the real issue is the fact that you don't really know how little space you could have, because you asked AFTER importing a lot of files, and that muddies up your question a little.
Seems like you would like to clean up your system. Come back if you need more help with that.

Hi comforteagle.

I can believe that a new apple machine has 18GB of stuff on it. I got an iBook last year (with Tiger, iLife05 and others) and was amazed. It might sound silly, but the first thing i did was to 'erase and install'. There were things installed that I didnt need:
- printer drivers (almost a gig, some from manufacturers which I dont need/never heard of)
- languages are the big thing. I saved over a gig by just selecting English and skipping all the others (including the asian fonts extras)
- all the free applications. i got a couple of games and an encyclopedia. that was a gig-and-a-half.
- iLife was the biggest culprit. Garageband needs several gig of space for all the loops and sound samples it has. if you dont need it, you space savings are huge.
- the developer tools can be skipped too if you dont need them (not sure if they are part of a standard install) and deselect X11 if you dont know what it is too.

Remember that ALL the software they give you on the machine is on the DVD(s) that are in the box - called 'Software restore' disks or similar. You can install what you want from these, one app at a time, if you need to.

I did an 'Erase and install' of OSX Tiger, and clicked on 'Customize', which i think is a button on the bottom-left of the next window. You can then look through all the 'bits' that are on the installer, and pick what you want. You can see how much space it will take up as you select/deselect things. Go through all the options, and open up the sub-folders. Each thing is described so you know what you are getting/missing.

its also a nice way to get to know your new machine, and get it nice and tidy (which pleases a control-freak like myself!)

chris

Heh, I just noticed that my 80G HD is actually 74G according to "df -h".

For those keeping score at home that's 18+6=24G though, of course, that other 6 isn't due necessarily to OS X.

I'm going to go for a clean formatting & see what kind of results I get & will report back later.

Marketing of storage devices uses a base-10 system so when they say 80GB (giga = 10^9 = billion) they really mean 80,000,000,000 bytes. However, the amount of bytes will be slightly over that to accommodate for the base-2 , or binary, system used by computers.


80^9 ÷ 1024 = 78,125,000 KB

78,125,000 ÷ 1024 = ~76,294 MB

76,294 ÷ 1024 = ~74.5 GB

Yeah, i really wish they wouldnt do that.

This seems like a good point to start ranting...

How can they get away with that? Isn't that lying? 1GB=1024MB, 1MB=1024kB - that is an uncontestable fact. Using a base-10 system to count bytes is tantamount to "making ***** up".

Imagine all the wonderful crap this marketing team could come up with:
* retail spaces are rented by the square foot - what if the landlord suddenly decided that 1 foot = 10 inches?
* medicines are measured in cubic centimeters - what if your doctor suddenly decided that 1 cm = 1/2 inch?

Apple has produced some wonderful products, but I don't think we should let them continue to make up definitions for words anymore. Let's hold them accountable to established facts. I don't mind buying an 18GB iPod, just as long as they don't try to tell me it is 20GB.

Worker201,

The bottom line is, there are in fact over 80 billion bytes on the HDD. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Giga means billion of specifically 10^9 (10 to the 9th power) or in strict computing terms 2^30 (2 to the 30th power). I agree that it's misleading, but that is marketing for you, and everyone does it, not just Apple. I don't think the average person even realizes this fact or would understand it if you explained it to them. Imagine that two identically priced HDDs are adverted at 80GB and 74.5GB. Which would sell more? After we kill all the lawyers, we should go after marketing.

Before ranting, read this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
Note that it is now considered proper to use GiB when meaning the power of two number.
Bottom line: the use of GB is industry standard, nothing particular to do with Apple who is just following the standard.

That's very interesting that the IEC and the SI have comments on the usage. Perhaps they are right, that 2 different words are needed.

But get this: my new MacBookPro was advertised as having 1 gigabyte of RAM. That's not 1000MB, that's 1024MB - 2 x 512MB. Using a different meaning for the same word for 2 different aspects of the computer is extremely misleading. Perhaps not a lie, as I implied earlier, but definitely inconsistent. And what bugs me the most is that it is intentionally inconsistent.

My USB Flashdrive is labeled 256MB. Does it have 256,000,000 bytes, or does it have 268,435,456 bytes? Neither. It has 249,886,000 bytes. Gotta love computers! :D

Let's keep to the original topic, shall we?

Between iLife, plus the usual trial installs of Office 2004 and iWork, plus all the languages, fonts and printer drivers, 18 gig actually sounds about right. Also the xCode installer is probably on there somewhere too.

I think I can do a custom install of Tiger from the retail DVD and bring it in around 2 gig. That's pretty stripped, of course, and lacks iLife and xCode, but I can make a functional system with it.

As if it wasn't confusing enough...

"Certain units are always understood as decimal even in computing contexts. For example, hertz (Hz), which is used to measure clock rates of electronic components, and bit/s, used to measure bit rate. So a 1 GHz processor performs 1,000,000,000 clock ticks per second, a 128 kbit/s MP3 stream consumes 128,000 bits (16 kB, 15.625 KiB) per second, and a 1 Mbit/s Internet connection can transfer 1,000,000 bits (125 kB, approx 122 KiB) per second (assuming an 8-bit byte, and no overhead).

"Because of this, a very confusing hybrid system is sometimes used, in which a "megabyte" means a thousand 1024-byte "kilobytes". Thus, as of 2005, manufacturers universally use the designation "1.44 MB diskette" for a product which holds neither 1.44×220 bytes nor 1.44×106 bytes, but rather 1.44×1000×1024 bytes (approximately 1.406 MiB, or 1.475 MB). Some manufacturers of disk-like flash memory seem to have adopted the somewhat dubious practice of selling drives measured in power of two multiples of decimal megabytes!

"Modern-day PC users, of course, regard both RAM and disk as kinds of storage and expect their capacities to be measured in the same way. Operating systems usually report disk space using the binary version. To the purchaser of a "30 GB" hard drive, rather than reporting either "30 GB" or "28 GiB", [your system] reports "28 GB". This creates hard feelings that have even led to legal disputes, sometimes made worse by other technical issues such as failure to distinguish between unformatted and formatted capacities and to account for the overhead inherent in disk file systems.

"CD capacities are always given in binary units. A "700 MB" (or "80 minute") CD has a nominal capacity of about 700 MiB. But DVD capacities are given in decimal units. A "4.7 GB" DVD has a nominal capacity of about 4.38 GiB."

That sounds about right. I managed a similar size with Panther on an OLD clamshell iBookG3, which only had a 4-ish GB hard disk.

Its not the apps that take the space, but the printer drivers and all the extra languages & fonts.