If you have run out of storage space in your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with Retina display, don’t cry over your paltry 128GB drive or marginal 256GB of built-in flash-based storage just yet — you have a few cool ways to increase storage that don’t include choosing a new MacBook Pro with more storage.
- Macbook Air How To Check Storage
- Macbook Air Other Storage Delete
- Macbook Air Storage Space
- Macbook Air How To Check Storage Iphone
- Macbook Air How To Check Storage Capacity
- Macbook Air How To Check Storage Bin
Before you choose your storage upgrade method, I always advise MacBook users to delete or offload large files they don’t really need.
How to Save Space on a MacBook
Open and Apple menu on the top left-hand corner of your screen and click on About This Mac. A window will pop up with several options and click on the Storage tab. This will display a graphic bar of how much memory is being used and how much free space you have available. To do so, Open Finder, go to the View menu item in the menu bar, and select ‘Show toolbar.’ You’ll see a new bar at the bottom of the Finder window showing the number if items for the section you have selected on the left-hand pane and the total amount of storage your Mac has available. Check out how to use time machine.
Start by spending a few hours going through your Photos library and deleting those extra photos and video from your birthday party three years ago — do you really need three dozen birthday photos? Probably not. Pick a few good ones and delete the rest.
Next, delete any iTunes TV shows or movies you don’t plan on watching any time soon. Why? As part of your Apple iTunes account, nearly all of this purchased content can be downloaded again if you plan to binge on a series or go on a road trip. The last time I did this, I trimmed out 54GB of video — and it’s all waiting for me on some Apple server, ready to be downloaded again if I need it.
There is one more big storage win you need to know about: iOS device backups. If you backup your iPhone or iPad on your MacBook, go into iTunes, open Preferences, then select Devices. You’ll see a list of device backups. Delete any old, unneeded backups from older iPhones. As I typed this last sentence, I just deleted an old iPhone 5 backup and gained 7GB of space. This method only gets more useful as you upgrade your iPhones and/or iPads.
Now that you’ve done a little MacBook storage housekeeping, you’ll have a better idea how dire your storage needs really are, which will help you choose from your storage upgrade options below. Of course, to be fair, there is only one real storage “upgrade” and that’s number one on the list. Why? The rest are more technically workarounds that add storage to solve your storage needs in relatively simple ways.
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5 Easy MacBook Air and Pro Storage Upgrades
1. Upgrade the Internal MacBook Drive
If you have a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with Retina display, the internal solid state drives are glued into the case. A handful of older models are user upgradable through some handy kits, and if you have one of these MacBooks, this kind of upgrade will give you the best overall performance and ease-of-use.
Macbook Air How To Check Storage
To learn if you have a MacBook that has an SSD drive that you can upgrade yourself, check out, “How to Upgrade Your MacBook Air SSD,” or “How to Upgrade Your Retina MacBook Pro SSD Drive.”
If you have have a non-Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro, your storage upgrade is super easy: Check out, “How to Upgrade Your MacBook Pro with a Solid State Drive (SSD).”
![Air Air](https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_migrated/pics/0810macbook_imovie_12.jpg)
2. Use the SDXC Card Slot
Macbook Air Other Storage Delete
The 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pros all have SDXC card slots, which are used to make loading photos and video from cameras easy. Even if you use your SDXC card slot for this purpose, you don’t have to — many cameras can connect directly through USB, or you can pick up a USB-based card reader. So how do you use an SDXC card slot for your storage upgrade?
You can easily add storage to a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with Retina display with an SDXC card slot drive option like the TarDisk Pear system.
You have two basic choices, both of which cram up to 256GB of flash-based storage into what is essentially a tiny memory card that has been cut down to fit flush against the side of your MacBook. The first way is to use this card much like a tiny USB thumb drive — the drive will show up on your MacBook’s screen just as if you inserted a thumb drive or attached an external drive. You can drag and drop files onto the drive — or even move your iTunes library over to it. It’s very easy, but it also requires you to pay just a bit of attention to where you’re storing files. Check out the Transcend JetDrive Lite series.
The second option is semi-permanent but it’s also more seamless: The TarDisk Pear system bundles a slim aluminum flash-based memory card with an easy-to-use installation program that “fuses” your new storage with the built-in storage on your MacBook. This results in a drive that appears to be one single unified drive, and your MacBook stores your files and programs so that your most-used materials end up on your faster built-in drive.
The downside? If you want to remove the TarDisk, you’ll have to walk through an unpairing process. As a near-permanent solution, though, the TarDisk is incredibly easy to install and results in a more seamless experience than other SDXC-based options.
3. Use a USB 3.0 Thumb Drive
Some MacBook lovers will be able to use a relatively fast USB 3.0 “thumb drive.” These little sticks have gotten smaller over the years, making them not only portable – but relatively unobtrusive when they stick out of the side of your MacBook. These affordable drives are dirt-simple and durable, and you can slip them into most every other Mac or PC and get access to your files, depending on what you’re storing, of course. The downside is that they are easy to remove, and if you don’t intentionally “eject” the drive first, you could experience some data loss. So, again, as a storage upgrade solution, you have to pay attention to what files you’re storing on these drives — and pay attention to when you’re going to insert or remove them.
Check out the SanDisk Ultra Fit 128GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive — it’s a tiny drive that you could leave in your USB port all the time.
4. Use an External Hard Drive
Macbook Air Storage Space
External hard drives are bulky ways to add storage to a mobile MacBook — but they are cost-effective.
If you tend to use your MacBook on a desk, you can get a full-size external hard drive, some of which are small and rugged enough to travel with if you needed to. I recommend bus-powered drives so that you don’t need an extra power cable, and USB 3.0 drives are capable enough for most everyone. If you have a MacBook Air or Pro with a Thunderbolt port, you can get a Thunderbolt-based drive, but USB 3.0 drives are usually more cost-effective. In addition, if you have a truly massive photo or video library, external storage is by far the most cost-effective way to save it.
Again, the downside here is that you have to pay attention to how you use your external drive — and, of course, remember to back it up, too.
Need a recommendation? I like the Seagate Backup Plus Slim 1TB Portable External Hard Drive for Mac.
5. Use an Online Cloud Service
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Apple, Dropbox, Microsoft, and Google all offer online storage options, but if you’re reading this article, you need a lot of storage space, which will usually cost you a monthly fee — but not always. If you’re only storing photos and home video, you can use Google Photos free — unless you’re shooting photos that are more than 16 megapixels, in which case you’ll pay $2-10 per month for 100GB to 1TB of data. The free option is a great deal, but Google also mines your photos for data, which it then uses to make it services better — and to serve up ads to you. Google has the ability to scan photos and make judgements based on the content of your photos, in addition to reading the metadata in your photos, which provides time and GPS-based location stamps from when and where your took them.
Apple’s iCloud service, on the other hand, treats you as a customer, and Apple seems to be a company that would prefer to not know so much about you, nor collect as much data about you — but you’ll pay for this: 50GB of iCloud space is $1 per month, 200GB is $3, and 1TB is $10. These prices are pretty reasonable, and Photos and iCloud have the ability to place compressed files on your devices, helping you save some space on your MacBook or iPhone.
Use Caution with the Cloud
However, all of these cloud services come with risks beyond the monthly costs: Your usernames and passwords need to be secure, and hopefully no one will ever want to hack or use social engineering to compromise your online accounts. If you forget your password and/or lose your iPhone, good luck working through the bureaucracy of these behemoth companies to regain access to your precious photos and data: For example, if you lose your keys to your house, you can always break the door down to get access to your stuff — not so with cloud services. Cloud services for individuals don’t play well with the challenges of life faced by everyday consumers. On the flip side, cloud services can provide an off-site backup for you, which is handy in case of natural disasters or fires.
Personally, I’m a fan of storage devices and upgrades that I can directly control and access in person, which is why I recommend hardware solutions most often.
Get the Gear:
MacBook Air SSD Drives:
MacBook Pro with Retina SSD Drives:
Non-Retina MacBook Pro SSD Drive:
SDXC Card Drives:*
Small USB 3.0 Thumb Drives:
External Drives:
Macbook Air How To Check Storage Iphone
* Of course, if you use your SDXC card slot for loading photos, you can pick up a small USB-based card reader like the Kingston Digital MobileLite G4 Card Reader to easily load photos and video off of your SD camera cards through a USB port.
Macbook Air How To Check Storage Capacity
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The ability to know how to check up on key maintenance and operational functions on your MacBook Pro can help you understand how your computer works and give you insight into any problems that may arise.
Apple products are designed to allow you to access many key insights that will give you a look into the inner-workings of your computer. Some of this may seem complex at first, but it really is straightforward to figure out.
One of these key insights that are good to know is how to check the storage capacity of your MacBook Pro.
This will let you know how much room you have on your computer to keep any type of file and data you wish. This could be photos, videos, games, apps or any other piece of data that you want to store directly on the computer.
It’s good to keep track of this so you know when you might be running out of disk space.
Why is Storage Space Important?
Many of you might not pay that much attention to storage space anymore. Wd my passport for mac price.
This is probably because you have a very large hard drive that has more than enough space to store anything and everything you want to have on your computer. Storage technology has really improved and now allows us to have very large hard drives and storage capacities on our computers.
This isn’t always the case, however, and some of you might be nearing storage capacity. As you approach storage capacity, your computer may begin to function poorly as all of the files and programs start to eat up CPU and available RAM. You also might try to download a large or important file only to find out that you do not have enough storage space available.
By keeping an eye on your storage space, you will be able to better understand the state of your computer. It’s an easy check-up that you can use to troubleshoot slow performance or glitchy operations.
While you might want to keep every piece of data you have on your computer, you can easily back up files to an external hard drive or to the cloud and free up valuable storage space.
Macbook Air How To Check Storage Bin
How to Check Storage on MacBook Pro
There are a couple of different ways to check the storage on your MacBook Pro and we will take a look at them here. You can also set up your computer to have storage details always listed on the top of your screen if you wish to do so.
Method 1 – Use the Finder
- Open the Finder on your computer, usually, this is in your Dock.
- In the Finder locate your Hard Drive and open it.
- Click File in the Hard Drive menu and then click Get Info.
- A window will pop up that looks like this and you can see how much storage you have and how much is currently being used:
Method 2 – About This Mac
If you are running a newer macOS, Yosemite or above, you can easily check on storage space using the About This Mac method. This is the method I personally use the most and it is a really easy way to get this information quickly.
- Open an Apple menu on the top left-hand corner of your screen and click on About This Mac.
- A window will pop up with several options and click on the Storage tab.
- This will display a graphic bar of how much memory is being used and how much free space you have available. It will even give you a color-coded breakdown of how much memory is being used for what.
Method 3 – Disk Utility
Another method to finding out how much storage you have on your MacBook is to use the Disk Utility function.
Disk Utility gives you access to a bunch of critical information about your MacBook Pro so it is good to know how to access it. This is not the fastest method to check your storage but is good to know so you can also access the utility for any other reason.
- Open the Finder from your Dock or Desktop.
- Click on Applications.
- Click on Utilities.
- Click on Disk Utility.
- A window will appear showing you how much storage is being used, how much free space is available and some other insights will be listed.
Method 4 – Storage Status Bar
If you want to constantly keep track of your storage, you can put a status bar on the main menu of your Finder that will pop up every time you open the Finder. To do this:
- Open the Finder.
- Open the View Menu from the top screen.
- Select Show Status Bar.
- Your storage information will now be listed at all times in the Finder.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, there are a handful of different methods to go about checking the storage on your MacBook Pro.
It is easy to do and a good habit to get into every now and then while you are working on your computer. If you have a large hard drive, you may never have to worry about filling it up but if you want to keep a lot of data and have your computer functioning at full speed and capacity, it’s good to keep track of.
Have you ever filled up your storage completely?