How to Clean Your Mac Hard Drive

When it comes to cleaning up your Mac's hard drive, there are a few different ways to go about it. In this article, we'll explore how to remove old junk on all of your disks, including everything from the Macintosh HD to Thunderbolt disks.

The app DaisyDisk is one way to free up storage space on your Mac by scanning your disk, even your cloud storage accounts, and producing a profile map of all its content. This can help you identify what's taking up space on your hard drive and give you the opportunity to clean it out.

To start, open the Apple Menu and select Storage to check your 'Other' space usage. On older versions of macOS (pre-macos 12), this will allow you to view your storage and System Data. However, if you're running macOS Monterey or later, you can find this information by opening System Preferences and clicking General.

Once in the Storage tab, you'll see a bar with different colors that represents the overall data stored on your Mac's hard drive. Hovering over the bar will give you an exact idea of how much space System Data is consuming. The System Data Bar is the gray bar farthest to the right.

System Data storage refers to all the miscellaneous files on your device, including temporary files, app plugins or extensions, cache files, disk archives, and backups. This category can take up a significant amount of space on your hard drive, limiting your ability to store other important items.

In this article, we'll explore what System Data is and how to delete it to free up more storage space on your Mac's hard drive.

Overall, cleaning up your Mac's hard drive can be done in a few simple steps. By identifying what's taking up space and removing unnecessary files, you can free up more storage space and make your computer run more efficiently.

How to clean mac hard drive