Ideally, 10% of the disk should be free to leave your Mac’s OS enough space to operate. What most people don’t realize is that their Mac actually converts the available space on their startup disk into virtual memory, which you use for day-to-day operations.

When a Mac startup disk is reaching full capacity, it is bad news for two reasons:Ī disk that is full (or even near full) is going to perform slowly. What does it mean when your Mac says the disk is full? So, when the “Your startup disk is almost full” message pops up, it basically means you are running out of space on your primary disk drive, and that is very bad news. Let’s start with the beginning: what is a startup disk? Well, it’s the hard drive that contains your operating system, which makes it the most important disk of all. But how could a full startup disk affect you? Because there comes a day in the life of every Mac user when the message “Your startup disk is almost full” will hit you hard. So, these days, it’s essential to know how to clean the startup disk on Mac. In some cases, it was 9GB worth of cache collected from one site alone. Artem Russakovskii from Android Police spotted that Chrome creates notoriously large cache folders even after you’ve visited seemingly simple sites like. It for sure reduces the toll on your hard drive.

The modern macOS versions like macOS Monterey, which is now succeeded by macOS Ventura, are increasingly browser-oriented and aim to perform most of the work online. The maximum hard drive size you can currently get is 8 TB, but sorry, that’s a Mac Pro or a top MacBook Pro. How to fix the “Startup Disk Full” error on your MacĪs of 2022, Mac hard drives are as spacious as ever.

How to clear out space on mac