Systems Folder?, How to free up memory... Options

[alreed]

hi forum,

I'm wondering if anyone can help?

I have an iBook with a small, but sufficient hard drive of 28GB (I use external hard drives when I'm recording in Cubase or working with big files).

The problem is, even though my applications and iTunes(under User) only take up 10GB, since everything else is on the external hard drives, my hard drive says I'm using 27GB in total. That's 17GB unaccounted for! It was ok when it was 3-4GB, but 17 seems a bit much. Do I need to reinstall, or is it something wrong with my systems folder?

Any help would be REALLY appreciated, I've had this problem for the past year now!

Thanks...

[qusp74]

Could be fragmentation and remnants of old files, but it's far more likely to be just the scratch disk space needed for your system and applications to work. Have you upgraded your ram recently? Ram typically needs roughly 3 times the amount of harddisk space spare as a swap file. 1gb ram=3gb space needed 3gb=9gb needed. BUT thats just for the system to operate efficiently so it will usually allow you to right to it...up to a point.

How about vst plugs etc.? where are you keeping them? they could be in the library folder that is in the root level of your harddrive, rather than the one in your user directory and some of those babies are have HUGE sample sets to make them work. Also... is this number 27gb consistent or does it change during operation? Some applications need their own scratch space to work... Photoshop is a major culprit in this department.

So yes some more info would help us to nail this problem down for you.