How to Check Free Space on a Mac Hard Drive

In today’s era of multi-terabyte hard drives and online storage, many of us don’t monitor our disk usage as carefully as we used to. Yet even the largest records eventually fill up.

If you don’t know how to check your disk space usage on your Mac, here’s where to look first.

And for long-term maintenance, there are plenty of powerful apps like CleanMyMac ($34.95/£34.95) and DaisyDisk ($9.99/£9.99) that offer useful visualizations of your storage on hard drive, while also allowing you to delete unnecessary files that are hogging storage space. too much space. Many of them also offer free trials. We have covered which ones are worth downloading in the list of best Mac cleaners.

Also check out our guide on how to free up disk space on a Mac.

Options 1 and 2: from Finder

The Finder gives you several ways to find out how much free disk space you have. These are the simplest ways.

Preview your storage device. On macOS, if you select an item in Finder and press the space bar on your keyboard, you get a preview of the item. For example, if you select a text document and then press the spacebar, you can see the contents of the document without opening it.

You can use the preview to check the capacity of your storage device. Here’s how.

1. Select the storage device on the desktop. (To make your storage device appear on your desktop, go to Finder and select Finder > Preferencesclick on General, and change the setting to Show these items on the desktop.) Or open a Finder window, look in the left column, under the Devices and select the storage device.

2. Press the spacebar. You should see a window open showing your storage device capacity and available space.

3. To close the window, press the Spacebar again or press Command-W, or click the close window icon (the X circle) at the top left.

Finder window status bar. If you want to have an overview of your available disk space from Finder at any time, you can enable the Finder status bar.

1. Open a Finder window if you don’t already have one (click the Finder Dock icon or go to File > New Finder Window).

2. Open the See menu and select Show status bar. This will show you how many items are in the current folder, and if you look at a folder on your hard drive (such as your Applications or Documents folder), you’ll also get a reading of how much free space your hard drive has.

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Options 3: Obtain information

1. Search for your hard drive in Finder and select it. If it appears in the sidebar of the Finder window or on the desktop (it doesn’t by default), go to Finder > Preferences to change this), click on your hard drive icon in one of these places. If your hard drive icon does not appear there, go to Go > Computerthen click the hard drive icon under Devices.

2. Click on the Deposit menu and select Obtain informationsor press Comand-I on your keyboard.

The Information window displays capacity, available space, used space, and other information.

Option 4: About This Mac

In recent versions of macOS, you can easily check your disk usage from the About area. Here are the instructions for macOS Sonoma.

1. Open the Apple menu, then select About this Mac.
2. Click it More information button. This brings you to General > About system settings section.
3. In the main section of the window, scroll down and find the Storage section. Here you will find out how much free space is available. It will say something like “XXX.XX GB of 994.66 GB”.
4. Click the Storage Settings button and you will be able to see details about the files taking up space on your disk. See below.

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Option 5: From Disk Utility

You can also view your free disk space from your Mac’s Disk Utility application. Open Spotlight by clicking the magnifying glass in the upper right corner of the screen, then type Disk Utility in the search box that appears. Once Disk Utility appears in the list and is highlighted, press the Return key. Disk Utility is also located in Applications > Utilities.

Here’s how to check your storage capacity.

1. The name of your Mac drive appears in the left column. Click on the topmost list of your Mac’s drive.
2. In the main window, a list of different statistics appears. The Free label tells you how much free space is available on the entire disk.
3. If you have partitioned your disk, you can see the amount of free space in each partition. Click the arrow next to your drive name in the left column. It should expand to display your scores.
4. Click on a partition and you will see its information in the main window, including free space.

With Disk Utility, you can also check the free space of any drive you have connected to your Mac from this window, whether it’s a USB drive or an external hard drive.

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Option 6; Use the terminal

The Mac’s command line interface can be used to check the free space on your drive. The command line uses the Terminal, which is located in the Applications > Utilities case. Launch Terminal and when prompted, type df -h and press the Return key.

A list of data points appears for your meter. Look for it /System/Volumes/Data SEO; in the Avail column, you will see the amount of free space your disk has. This information is provided in gibibytes and you can convert it to gigabytes by multiplying it by 1.073741824. In the screenshot above, 814 gibibytes equals 874 GB.

Need to free up some extra space for this download? Here’s how to free up disk space on a Mac, we also explain how to delete system storage on a Mac and how to delete other storage on a Mac. You may also want to use Optimized Storage in macOS to manage your storage.