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macOS Not Showing Actual Free Space of External WD SSD

macOS Monterey doesn't show me the actual free space of the external SSDs. I have two 2TB WD Blue external SSD NVMe drives. I copied 900GB files from one to the other. All the space of the old file is occupied. I cleared the Trash, restarted in Safe Mode, restarted my iMac. Still the same result. The Finder information panel and Disk Utility gives 1.3TB while there is now one file left of 400GB. Why such a big difference?

Best Answered by

Connie Yang

Answered on Monday, April 29, 2024

How did you clear the Trash? For external hard drives, the free space that the files occupy can only be released after moving them to the Trash and emptying the Trash. If you just move them to the Trash, the space that the deleted files take won't be freed up.

Besides, the hard drive has purgeable space. It consists of data that the system deems suitable for deletion. You can right-click on your SSD and select Get Info to check its accurate free space and used capacity.

Sometimes, Spotlight index error can also lead to the Mac showing the wrong free space. You can re-index Spotlight to solve the issue:

  1. Go to Apple menu > System Settings.
  2. Select Siri & Spotlight and then scroll down the right panel to find Spotlight Privacy.
  3. Drag the SSDs to the list that Spotlight is blocked from indexing. Or, you can click the add button (+) to add it to the list.
  4. Select the SSDs you just added and click the remove button (-) to delete them from the list.

Now, you can go to Disk Utility to see if the storage space of the two SSDs shows correctly.