You Really Haven’t Gained All That Hard Disk Space with Snow Leopard
I’m seeing lots of reports in forums about how people have gained 10, 20, even 30 GB of hard disk space after installing Snow Leopard. It’s interesting, because Apple claims that the OS takes up 6 GB less than Leopard, but a lot of this difference is simply because printer drivers and localization files are not included in the basic installion as they were before. Me, I save a total of .44 GB by upgrading.
But why are so many people claiming such space savings? It turns out that with Snow Leopard, Apple has changed the way file sizes – and hard disk sizes – are reported in the Finder. There’s the old issue of 1000 vs 1024 in counting data (nimbly explained by Macworld’s Jason Snell), which means that your hard drive, which was previously 8% smaller than it’s advertised capacity, now looks bigger. For example, my boot partition, which was 100 GB under Leopard, is about 107 GB under Snow Leopard. My 1 TB music disk, which held 920 GB under Leopard, holds a full 1 TB now. This isn’t because there’s more space, but rather because it’s counted differently.
(One other difference is that many people will look at their disk space before upgrading, and not realize that there is an invisible amount of space used by virtual memory files. This can be as much as 2 GB in normal use, or even more on Macs with low amounts of RAM. So when they restart, those files haven’t yet been created, making the difference look even bigger.)
So, if you do a stock installation of Snow Leopard, you’ll save several GB of space. But if you customize like I do, you may find that you’ve only saved a few sectors on your hard disk. But it’ll look a lot bigger. Size matters, you know.
