how risky is it to have Macs online these days?

[M A V I C]

[quote C(-)ris][quote GGD]Can anyone quote any documentation from Apple that states that you need to leave 10-15% of the space on a drive free, and the reason why.

With a 20 GB Drive you're saying that it's OK to get down to 2 GB, but if you took that same data and copied it onto a 1 TB Drive you're saying that now the exact same system needs 100 GB - 150 GB free. Where is 100 GB of data going to come from that will suddenly fill up the drive?

I agree that running it down to zero can be bad on any OS, but I'd like to know where Apple says 10% to 15% free that is so widely quoted on this forum as a requirement.
It isn't Apple that states this. It is the nature of hard drives. The more data you put on the platters the longer it takes to find free space and read or write files. When the drive gets more than 10 or 15% full it has a very hard time finding free space and has to search through a lot of information.
IME, I like to keep the drives no less than 40% free. I do find a significant slowdown otherwise.

[Jimmypoo]

[quote freeradical][quote Don Kiyoti]

Yes, enough to make you look foolish. Jeez...

Are you saying he's a vampire???

[Jimmypoo]

btw.... the free space isn't just about using it for virtual drive space. You start impinging on that space, and you'll get into the overlapping files on the directory nightmare.

You don't want to have to deal with running DiskWarrior for 7 days to fix it all.

As for 1TB = 150GB, no, I wouldn't go that far. But I certainly wouldn't want to get below 10GB because of all the space that is taken up by the OS. One look at your processes under Leopard will show you that nearly 10-15GB is allotted as the default, though it is both dynamic, and highlighting it will drop it down to what it has actually set aside... for a WHILE, then it will re-allot itself the designed in virtual scratch space.

No doubt about it wanting space -- but that having been said, I've run a Pismo once to zero, under Panther, and unlike a few of you at the time (Summer 05), I lucked out, and when I rebooted (I was using PS CS 1), I got my space back, and enough to start pulling stuff off the drive, and had no directory errors.

Some people use Onyx -- I like/prefer Cocktail for running the daily/weekly/monthly scripts for maintenance. I do find that running permissions and keep the desktop clear of crap helps, as does trying to get rid of the billion tiny files and screenshots that I tend to create and/or snatch off the net.

I see a clear difference between my maintenance partition's boot time and my primary, as it gets bigger. It's become much longer (perhaps a minute vs. 20 seconds with the sundial/clock running), and the same is true for shut down time.

I've used TechTool 4.6.1 to defrag a few times (despite what everyone says -- Apple offered up TechTool 3.0x as part of AppleCare, so defragging must have SOME purpose, and so I've run it, but each time I've done so, like any OS, I've done so with the possibilities of losing it all addressed via back-up.

The last "virus" I remember getting was some crap in 1991, that came on a floppy, and "Disinfectant" from Northwestern's Computer Science guru took care of that. That was with System 7.0.x / 7.1 on my Mac II with 8MB of BLISTERING 80ms RAM!

So... other than LOSING the maintenance scripts by turning it off, (and power), I see no reason to not choose what is convenient. I leave the mini on 24/7, and the Blue and White, when it is loaded with drives.... but the MacBook and Pismo, I leave off, simply because I'm uncomfortable leaving them run 24/7 for many reasons, all of them having to do with heat.

I prefer they don't do any "auto-sleep"ing... so I just turn them off.

[Silencio]

You've got a Summa DC3? Guess you do a lot of vinyl work and/or large format printing. I guess I can understand why you have a machine running Mac OS 9 dedicated to running one of those printers now, as some of those old large format machines and/or the RIPs that drive have well and truly been abandoned. I don't follow that market as closely as I once did, but I have a project I'm working on that may require a 24-36" wide printer. A lot has changed since the days when the HP DesignJet 650 and ENCAD NovaJet III roamed the earth.

[Seannie]

you want to buy a not-too-used DC3 Plus at a good price? hehe. I love it and have had some fun but I'm getting more and more into video and photography and find I get bogged down (stuck inside) doing custom vinyl work. I am able to drive the DC3 and a Graphtec Plotter with my PowerMac and iMac OSX via Flexi-Sign Pro, but I need the G4 OS9 to run my Alps printers, which aren't even made anymore but I have 4 of them plus several hundred cartridges of ink. I stocked up when I heard they were quitting. They are the BEST t-shirt transfer printers for longevity and rich colors.

The DC3 is nice because it doesn't require lamination and is non-toxic. Even the eco-sol inks put off fumes and since I work here inside my home, I didn't want that.

[Lew Zealand]

Our organization supports roughly 1000 Macs on campus here and we do not have a campuswide firewall. In the last 15 years, where I have direct experience I have encountered 3 hacked Macs total (because people turned SSH on [it's not on by default and we recommend not enabling it] and easily guessed passwords [very poor judgement]). We haven't seen a single virus infected Mac in more than 8 years and those were from the OS 8 and 9 days - *none* from the OS X days. The majority of these Macs are left on all the time and slept when not in use and we don't have slowdowns from this type of use.

The only trouble we get is from hardware failure (unavoidable), disk errors (DiskWarrior to the rescue), and configuration problems (of all types - network, OS, App, etc., you name it).

Even with our open network, we simply do not have problems due to continuous access to the Internet except for those 3 SSH people and even then, your firewalled router would prevent that from being a problem.

[Article Accelerator]

[quote GGD]Can anyone quote any documentation from Apple that states that you need to leave 10-15% of the space on a drive free, and the reason why.
Mac OS X uses free disk space for at least three things:

1. the virtual memory 'backing store'
2. hotfile optimization and defragmentation
3. sleepimage storage

- The more applications you run simultaneously and or the less real RAM you have, the more disk space that will be consumed for 1.
- Larger disks mean more files which lead to a higher requirement for 2.
- The more real RAM you have the more disk space you need for 3. If you have 4 GB of RAM, you'll need 4 GB of free disk space for the sleepimage.

[ka jowct]

IME, I like to keep the drives no less than 40% free. I do find a significant slowdown otherwise.

Same here. Some of the apps I use need plenty of free space, aside from whatever requirements the OS has.