Problem with Finder not displaying the SSD remaining space correctly

[Bernarada]

Hi

Since yesterday, the Finder stopped displaying the actual remaining space on my 1TB SSD. It says that I have 289G remaining free space, while I know that there's actually around 600G. When I calculate the total size of the 4 basic folders of the SSD (the apps + the library + the system + the users folders) it comes to around 375G. Which does leaves around 600G.

I tried everything I could think of to solve the problem, but nothing works. I was actually running Sonoma and I thought that maybe updating to Sequoia would fix the problem (I was thinking anyway it was time to update), updating to Sequoia went well, everything seems to be working fine, but the problem persists.

It's as if some 300G are hiding/hidden somewhere. It baffles me. I've been using Macs for ages (I use an M1 Pro "14 now) and this never happened.

If anyone has any idea as to what may cause that behavior, please let me know. Thanks.

PS: I tried trashing the Finder .plist file in the Preferences, thinking that might help, but it didn't.

 

[MacInWin]

How is this drive formatted? How many Containers/Volumes on the drive? What does Disk Utility show? And while we ask questions, what Mac? You said you are running Sequoia, so are you updated to the latest verion (15.1.1)? There are many reasons for inaccurate/incorrect space reports of space used/available.

 

[ferrarr]

Is this an internal drive, or an external? Have you restarted the Mac?

I just had this issue with an external 500GB SSD. But I was able to erase the drive and that fixed the issue for me.

 

[pm-r]

If anyone has any idea as to what may cause that behavior, please let me know. Thanks.

I have no idea what might have caused the problem but what does your Disk Utility say as to the amounts used or remaining on that drive?




- Patrick
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[MacInWin]

One of the strange things about file sizes on APFS is that depending on how the files are moved from internal to external drives, the shown sizes can be really way off. Howard Oakley has a number of articles on the issue that can be accessed here: Search Results for “file size” – The Eclectic Light Company

Part of the challenge is that modern versions of macOS not only encrypt the files by default, they also compress them automatically. But when Finder and Terminal report the size of any file, it shows the fully expanded size, sort of, for the data so that if the user tries to copy that file to an external, the user can at least have a rough estimate of how much space is acutally needed. But the process is not precise, unfortunately. So, depending on how the user "looks" at the file size, the file can be quite a bit out of order.

From the OPs comments, what may have happened is that if the files started on the internal, with full compression, and then were copied to the external, they may have been expanded to non-compressed files and therefore take up more space. If the external is formated as HFS+ or exFAT, for example, then it doesn't support the compression at all, so looking at the source may show one number and copying them expands them to another, much larger, number. Hence my question about how the drive is formatted.

Another issue is whether or not there is another partition/Container on the drive that got there by accident and which has consumed a lot of space not presently visible to Finder. I noted that the OP mentioned the four fundamental root folders (System, Library, Apps and Users), which may imply the internal was somehow cloned. But cloning will also expand files if the receiving drive is not APFS, so again, the files could be expanded in the process.

There is much about his situation we do not know and need to know to be able to talk intelligently about what may have happened.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

It's as if some 300G are hiding/hidden somewhere.

You may have one, or both, of two common things going on.

First is that your Mac stores a lot of meta data on your drive. It's sort of transitory, so it isn't always reported in the Finder. Even worse, Macs have been known to encounter a minor problem, for which an error message is written to a log file (which is meta data). But since ordinary users don't usually look at their log files (ever), the minor problem is never addressed, and the error message is written to the log over and over and over, until the log file balloons to a huge size, and it takes up a lot of storage space. You can test this, and at least temporarily fix the problem, by clearing all of your Mac's logs. This is easy and free to do using:

Maintenance (free)
https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/maintenance.html
(just run it using the default settings)

Please let us know if things get better after running Maintenance.

A second common problem is that both rotating disk hard drives and SSD's require that you maintain a surprisingly large amount of free space to keep things running well. (For a host of reasons that I won't get into here.) At 70 to 80% full, your Mac can start acting flaky. You are at that level now. You can buy yourself some time with a rotating disk hard drive by clearing off some space and then defragmenting your hard drive.

http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html#itemfive

However, that won't work with an SSD, even if you clear off space, and even if you re-initialize your SSD. With an SSD, once you get to about 70% full, it's time to think about getting a new, larger drive.

"When you’re getting close to the 70% threshold, you should consider upgrading your computer’s SSD with a larger drive."
https://pureinfotech.com/why-solid-state-drive-ssd-performance-slows-down/