The last few years of mini models have hard drives locked away like an idol in the Temple of Doom. But neither that nor swap, in which hard disk space is used to store inactive elements of memory, was causing problems as well, according to Activity Monitor.Īnd I didn’t have an easy path to the obvious solution: swapping in an SSD, a solid-state drive that could be orders of magnitude faster than the 5400 rpm hard drive in the mini. Mavericks added memory compression, a way to maximize physically installed RAM that gave new life to my MacBook Air.
During the slow post-restart, pre-usable phase, neither memory nor disk storage was an issue. Using Activity Monitor, and in the Terminal, the top command, I could see I was often running up against the limits of physical memory, but the Mac didn’t seem to be under “memory pressure,” which would cause a lot of disk activity. That helped, but didn’t fix the problem all the way. WhatSize let me quickly locate and delete 90GB of files I didn’t need.
There was clearly something to do with temporary files and available disk storage slowing things down. I used WhatSize (which I also reviewed) to free up almost 90GB in unneeded files, which seems to help a little.
