Click the Apple icon in the menu at the top-left corner of your screen.

Now that we’ve identified our startup disk, let’s take a closer look at how to check your disk space: If your startup disk is full and you get a message warning from your Mac, this is a serious indication that you need to clear up storage immediately. A hard disk should never get beyond 85% capacity (especially a startup disk), as you will experience slowness and errors the further you get above that mark. It’s a lot like why is your fridge full? There is no more space! Your disk is almost full, and this is very bad news for any drive. It’s possible to have multiple startup disks, but most Macs will only have one. And for proper disk cleanup on Mac, all drives are just as important. The Mac drive with the OS on it is the startup disk, while the other drive is just used for the storage of files. And since you only have one disk, this is your startup disk - all 500GB.Ī Mac with two disks will have the storage divided between them.The disk has an operating system (macOS Ventura) and user data (apps, etc.).It has one “disk” on it, so all 500GB of storage is on that disk.Let’s look at an example of a Mac with only one hard disk: Most Mac users have just one disk, but power users may have two or more. Each disk (or partition) has your Mac data on it, which consists of your operating system, applications, etc. Your Mac hard drive consists of disks (or partitions). Understanding What “Your Disk is Almost Full” Means What is a startup disk?Ī startup disk, as taken from the Apple Support article, is a volume or partition of a drive that contains a usable operating system. Still confused? Let’s break it down for you. This problem comes under two different notifications: “Startup disk full” in older macOS versions and “Your disk is almost full” in newer ones.Īnnoying as it may be, it’s an issue that has many solutions, and we’ll cover them in this article. So, let’s find out what exactly “Your disk is almost full” means and how to fix it.

But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below.įeatures described in this article refer to the MacPaw site version of CleanMyMac X.Ī full startup disk is something that every Mac user may experience. So here’s a tip for you: Download CleanMyMac to quickly solve some of the issues mentioned in this article.

Disk space cleaner