Snow Leopard Upgrade Completed — How Much Storage is Reclaimed?
It’s far too early to get into performance, user interface changes or application compatibility, but my Snow Leopard update is complete. Removing legacy code and optimizing existing functions surely has a noticeable impact on hard drive space, as expected. Here’s a before and after of the hard drive on my Mac Book:
Although it looks like I’ve essentially gained 24GB of storage capacity as a result of the upgrade, the actual space used has only decreased by about 7GB after the 42 minute process. See the difference in how Leopard reported free space as opposed to Snow Leopard? The exact same hard drive shows as a different total capacity in the Activity Monitor. Note — I didn’t install the language translations, but that effort isn’t too significant to the extra space — not installing them only saves 271MB of storage.
Personally, I couldn’t care less about the extra capacity whether it’s 7GB or 24GB. I don’t install many applications as I live in a browser, so it’s not like I really need the space. For traditional Mac users however, the extra storage is surely welcome. As far as application compatibility, I better go check out Audacity — I have to mix our weekly podcast for publication later today and that’s an essential application for me.
Did you receive and upgrade to Snow Leopard? Drop a comment with any experiences, issues or compatibility problems.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
ok the OS taking up less room i get… but where did the other space magically come from???
math differences between 1000 and 1024 multiplied by several THOUSANDS
so wait they made the new OS LESS accurate in reporting disk space? ’cause to get bigger you’d be moving from 1024 to 1000 and we all know 1024 is the right number. right?
@scott
There is no conspiracy here. All hard drive manufacturers moved to defining a gigabyte as exactly 1,000,000,000 bytes years ago (giga = billion, you know) because consumers couldn’t understand what a gigabyte is base 2 meant). Computer programmers, on the other hand, like to count in base 2 so a gigabyte is something completely different. So the OS when using “Get Info” reports hard drive space using the Base 10 standard while disk utilities (like picture above) will report the actual number of bytes.
The point is, whether you count in base 10 or base 2, you don’t have any more or less space in reality. A rose by another name would smell as sweet, as it were.
i understand the math (1,000,000,000 vs 1,073,741,824) from my freshman comp sci days.
but as a computer guy i -and i thought the rest of the industry- viewed 2^30th as the correct number 10^9 as the marketing number used by HD manufacturers.
i just seems like the intent of such a change is to DECEIVE customers… upgrade to SL and will tell you that you have more space ’cause we’re counting it differently.
I can already see the commercials now… I’m a mac and my HD’s are 7% bigger than PCs…
Done and everything is fine. It took 1hr and 2min to upgrade (I didn’t go for a clean install).
I’m in the process of installing Snow Leopard on my iMac. I decided to do a clean install because I’d been having occasional problems with Firewire on the computer so thought I’d eliminate 18 months worth of usage from the equation before calling AppleCare.
Anyway, after backing up in triplicate, I booted from the DVD, used Utilities to format the hard disk and installed the OS. Everything went through very smoothly. So far the only program that doesn’t work is XMarks (a pretty big issue). There also is no longer a printer driver for my HP DeskJet 5650.
I’ve installed all but one of my main apps and am now recovering my data from my backups. Only 98GB to go…..
Jake is loving the Snow Leopard!
” couldn’t care less about the extra capacity” – you are lying, you are only saying that because you are a windows guy and windows keeps getting bloated and bigger with every update. Kudos though for being open minded, using or at least trying all OSes.
Posting this from a Lenovo running XP.
uh… he’s using 1/5th of his HD space… so why would a little more space excite him?
or were you being ironic?
Mobile Me: obviously, you’re not a regular reader here, so I’ll let the way off base “you are lying” comment pass. ;)
If you *were* a regular reader, you’d know I’m generally OS-agnostic because I don’t install many apps — something I said in the post. I spend 98% of my days in a browser. Last summer I did an experiment — and blogged it here — trying to not use any apps other than a browser for 60 days. I’ve installed and used every edition of Windows, Mac OS X and various Linux distros. I’m a heavy user of cloud storage services as opposed to using local storage as well. That’s why I really don’t care about hard drive capacity — my purchase and use of the first ASUS Eee PC with 4GB of SSD memory ought to have proved that in 2007. And that’s the truth. :)
Kevin, your last post reminds me of that guy that recently had his eeepc set up for triple booting – yes he’s got linux, osx and win xp on the same eeepc. Now that truly is agnostic !
Could it be that he upgrade emptied the trash at the same time? That could explain the difference in storage. Maybe the Mac consider stuff in the trash as not used, but not free either? It might explain the diff in total capacity.