Disk Capacity 500 gb falls to 250 gb after deleting files

hard drive

I was attempting to free up disk space on my MB Pro – and subsequently deleted most of the iPhoto files & folders as I was constantly receing a 'your start up disk is almost full (e.g. 2.5 gb left out of 499 gb available.

So, having done that, my Hard Drive capacity is now showing only a 250 gb capacity – despite there apparently being a Hard Drive & a SSD each with 250gb.

How can I restore it to its full capacity?

Macintosh HD:

  Available:    195.88 GB (195,884,195,840 bytes)
  Capacity: 250.14 GB (250,140,434,432 bytes)
  Mount Point:  /
  File System:  Journaled HFS+
  Writable: Yes
  Ignore Ownership: No
  BSD Name: disk0s2
  Volume UUID:  1455A0BF-327D-3453-B82F-C2504F6EF7CC
  Physical Drive:
  Media Name:   APPLE SSD SD0256F Media
  Medium Type:  SSD
  Protocol: PCI
  Internal: Yes
  Partition Map Type:   GPT (GUID Partition Table)
  S.M.A.R.T. Status:    Verified

Below is the output from diskutil:

Cathryns-MacBook-Pro:~ cathrynggibson$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *251.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            250.1 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *8.0 GB     disk1
   1:                 DOS_FAT_32 NO NAME                 8.0 GB     disk1s1
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *7.9 GB     disk2
   1:                 DOS_FAT_32 CANON_DC                7.9 GB     disk2s1

Best Answer

You have one SSD (disk0) with 251 GB containing one visible volume 'Macintosh HD' (disk0s2) with a capacity of 250.14 GB of which ~54.3 GB are used and 195.88 GB should be free.

Additionally you have 2 devices attached:

  • probably a thumb drive (disk1) with one volume named 'NO NAME' (disk1s1) and the size 8 GB
  • a Canon SD-Card (in an attached camera?) (disk2) with one volume named 'CANON_DC' (disk2s1) and the size 8 GB

If the Finder doesn't show the full free space (195.88 GB) for 'Macintosh HD' or still complains about an 'almost full startup disk' check several answers here at ase:

Why is my startup disk so full?
Finder Reports Disk is Full, Other Tools Don't Account for it
How can I figure out what's slowly eating my HD space?