If you have an iCloud account (only $9.99 per month for 2 TB of cloud storage), it’s quite easy to let your Mac do the work of determining what to save in the cloud. Apple’s iCloud Drive is a perfect example, with DropBox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive as alternatives you may prefer. It’s also possible to store many of your files “in the cloud” - in other words, online in multiple data centers. For those cases where a single external drive isn’t large enough, RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) storage like the OWC Thunderbay 4 offers up to 72 TB (terabytes - that’s 72,000 GB!) of space. Most new Macs have Thunderbolt ports for high throughput to external devices. Your Mac drive stays relatively clutter-free, with the video files stored externally. Instead, consider storing those files on a fast external SSD like the OWC Envoy Pro FX. Store enough of those files on your Mac boot drive, and the space quickly disappears. Let’s say that I do video editing, using and creating files in the multi-gigabyte size range. By that, I mean moving data stored on the Mac’s boot drive to an external drive or storing it in the cloud. You’ll notice that I refer to offloading data as an alternative to upgrading Mac storage. In this case, if the amount of available storage got to about 100 GB, it would be time to upgrade or offload. A good rule of thumb is to consider upgrading storage or offloading data when your Mac is down to about 10% of available storage. The Mac in this example has a total of 994.66 GB (gigabytes) of storage, with 803.37 GB used. Wait for a moment, and a striped bar appears displaying storage usage: About This Mac storage tab When the About This Mac window appears, click the Storage tab. The easiest way to find out is to click the Apple () menu and select About This Mac.

How do I know if my Mac needs more storage?ĭo you need more storage? Your Mac may be in fine shape.

How to determine if your Mac needs more storage.

That’s usually on either a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state disk (SSD) in your Mac. Are you running out of storage space on your Mac? Storage refers to where data is kept on your Mac.

How to get more disk space on mac