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Some drives on desktop don't show free space
Authored by: luomat on Aug 30, '06 09:13:12AM

Several folks have asked this:s

1) Go to Finder

2) Close all Finder windows (cmd+opt+w)

3) press cmd+J or goto menu item View > "Show View Options"

4) Select "Show item info"

NOTE: Available drive space information is NOT updated very often, so don't rely on its accuracy. I usually think of it this way: "When I logged in, the free space was...."

Tip within a tip: If you want to force Finder to update the available space, create a new empty file at the root directory. For example if a drive is mounted as "/Volumes/External" then create a file /Volumes/External/blank.txt. That will trigger an update by Finder.

For your main hard drive, you have to create a file in /

You can delete the file as soon as you create it.

I usually do this in Terminal:

sudo touch /blank ; sudo rm /blank




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Some drives on desktop don't show free space
Authored by: mike666 on Aug 30, '06 09:33:24AM
2) Close all Finder windows (cmd+opt+w)

Not really necessary; just click anywhere on Desktop so that no Finder windows are frontmost.

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Conditions for update of available space
Authored by: stevebr on Aug 30, '06 10:49:54AM
NOTE: Available drive space information is NOT updated very often, so don't rely on its accuracy. I usually think of it this way: "When I logged in, the free space was...."

After some frustration and a lot of observation, I've noticed that the update takes place under the following conditions:

  • When the volume is mounted
  • When the contents of the top-level-directory of the volume change (/Volumes/MountedVol/, but not /Volumes/MountedVol/Subdir/)
  • At no other observable time (so no scheduled updates as far as I can tell)

In Tiger (at least from the last few revisions), this appears to be true for USB and FireWire disks with HFS+ and FAT volumes, as well as AFP and SMB mounted network shares.

As I mentioned, this is from observation only -- I don't presume to know definitively. It would be interesting to find out others' observations. We might be able to detect enough of a pattern to work out a scripted solution for better updates.



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