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How Much Space Do I Have Left On My Internal SSD Drive?

I’ve upgraded my MacBook Pro by replacing the hard drive with a 512 gig SSD. Speed is incredible. However I’m baffled by conflicting information about how much of that 512gigs I have free. From Finder, I click ‘get info’ and it shows me the SSD is 511.25 GB and that I have 152.16 GB available. That sounds good to me, however I have tried 2 third party utilities and they both tell me I have only about 100 gigs free.
Firstly, I scanned the SSD with ‘Daisy Disk, a nice utility and tells me I have 99.9 GB free. Then I use the utility ‘Cocktail’ and I get a reading which says ‘You are using 80% of available disk space (that’s 400 GB, so it is telling me about 100 GB is free.
Here’s another thing, earlier today ‘get info’ in the Finder told me I had just 120 GB free, so I spend half an hour cleaning up unwanted files and the space available moved up to 152 gigs, but repeated scans with Daisy Disk and Cocktail ‘before and after’ my clear out continue to show just 100 gigs free. A mystery, does anyone know if this is an issue specifiCally related to SSDs.
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Danbo

Comments: 3 Responses to “How Much Space Do I Have Left On My Internal SSD Drive?”

    11 years ago

    Third party apps like those are most likely not taking into account things like Time Machine Local Snapshots.
    You see, until recently, you simply had files on your drive, and the rest was "unused." Well, not exactly as you also had virtual memory (memory swap space on the drive).
    But with Lion and Mountain Lion on Macs, your computer uses some of the "unused" space for saving local snapshots -- these are backups of your files, like the ones you get with Time Machine when you backup to an external drive.
    The idea is to use the space for something, rather than just leaving it as random bits. It isn't as good as an actual Time Machine backup, as it doesn't protect you against theft or drive failure. But it does give you backup versions of files that you can use to revert to if you make a mistake.
    See: http://macmost.com/time-machine-local-snapshots.html

    Danbo
    11 years ago

    Thanks for the swift reply. So if I understand correctly, as 'get info' suggests I really do have 152 GB available, it is just most likely that around 50 GB of that is being used temporarily for things like 'Time Machine Snapshots' but the minute I need the space on my hard drive, I assume these 'Toime Machine Snapshots' etc will just be pushed out of the way ?

      11 years ago

      Right. Local Snapshots should be sensitive to your storage needs and will store less as you use more of your drive.

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