Investigating disk space in Mac OS X

Products

• VMware Desktop Hypervisor

Issue/Introduction

This article discusses general disk space use. To investigate a virtual machine's disk space use, see Verifying sufficient disk space for a VMware Fusion virtual machine (1021877).

Symptoms:

Disk space usage information is useful in addressing problems encountered as a result of a lack of disk space. Problems related to disk usage can include:

• Slow operating system performance
• Slow application performance
• An application is unable to load
• An application cannot continue to run
• The operating system unexpectedly stops or fails to respond

Environment

VMware Fusion 5.x
VMware Fusion 3.x
VMware Fusion 1.x
VMware Fusion 6.x
VMware Fusion 7.x
VMware Fusion Pro 8.x
VMware Fusion 8.x
VMware Fusion 4.x
VMware Fusion 2.x

Resolution

To determine disk space usage in Mac OS X:

1. Open a new Finder window.
2. Select Macintosh HD (or the drive you are checking).
3. Control-click the selected drive, and click Get Info.
   
   Under the General section, you can see the total Capacity, the space Available, and the Used space.

To see see the disk space usage information from the command line:

1. From Finder, go to Applications > Utilities.
2. Open Terminal.
3. Type df -H and press Enter.
   
   Disk usage is displayed for each file system. The first entry, that reads Mounted on / , is your boot volume.
   
   Note: To exit from Terminal, go to File > Quit and click OK to acknowledge the warning.

Additional Information

Disk utility in Mac can also be used to determine free space or disk information.

1. Launch Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities folder
2. On the left hand side click on your Hard disk item listed (usually Mac HD or Macintosh HD) to review the information.

Verifying sufficient disk space for a VMware Fusion virtual machine