[Tips]Deal with Startup Disk on Mac OS X

If your hard drive is almost full for storage, you will be prompted by the system and notify you to make more space available on your startup disk so that the system could run normally.



Before picking up some solution to solve this program, some people may feel confused about the startup disk. So what is startup disk?

A startup disk, also named Macintosh HD, is a drive that contains a usable operating system, applications and home folders. Every Mac has hard drive consists of disks. But most of the Mac users get only one disk and of course, some may have two or more. If your Mac only gets one disk, then it is also your startup disk. If you get two or more disks, the Mac drive with the OS on it is the startup disk and the other disk(s) is (are) just for storage.

How to Fix Startup Disk Full

When come across this situation, what would you do to solve the problem? Here, I will recommend a few tips to free up and release your Mac when the startup disk is full.

Method 1 Empty the Trash
It is the first way that you should try to free up your hard drive. Every time you delete the useless files, you would put them into your trash can on Mac. However, though you have deleted them, it still occupies the storage. So if you have many files in the Trash, it would be better to permanently delete them or empty the Trash.



Method 2 Remove Programs You Don't need
You may downloaded and installed the programs before. However, they have become useless for you as you don't need the applications anymore. As we all know, keeping programs on Mac can consume lots of storage space. So why not just delete the programs which are useless for you?

Methods 3 Move Contents to an External Hard Drive
You can click on the Apple menu on the upper-left corner of your Mac screen and then navigate to "About This Mac > Storage". Then you can have an overview of the space used by different categories such as apps, files, photos, movies etc. as well as the free space. You can find out what kinds of contents are consuming your storage most and you can move them to an external hard drive or sync them to the cloud service. Make sure they are safely moved, and then you can delete those files to cleanup Mac hard drive.

Method 4 Clean Up Your Mac
Cleaning up your Mac is the most effective method to fix the lack of storage space problem. It may be too difficult to clean up your Mac system manually and also time-consuming. So a Mac cleaning software is needed and you are recommended to use the CleanMyMac 3 program. You are able to choose the Smart Cleanup option to scan out series of items and clean them up without any loss to your system or provide data. Or you can also try to use the other options to deeply identify files and choose what you want to remove.





After trying the above methods, I am pretty sure the "Startup Disk Almost Full" message would not show up and you can use your Mac normally.