While I wait for Dell to ship my Dell Mini 9, I did the only thing I can do: pretend. Borrowing an idle Mac Mini, I installed, updated, and trimmed OS X to see how much breathing room I’ll have on the 16G SSD. I’ll put my process here for my own reference when I do it again for real but also for anyone who might come by and is curious.
- Formatted SSD as 16G HFS+ partition. I’m not sure what the actual size of the SSD will be (I’ve heard ~13G usable)
- Installed 10.5.4 with everything option turned off
- Did initial set-up and let Spotlight build initial search index
7.92G Used, 8.08G Free - Installed available updates:
- Remote Desktop Client Update 3.2.2
- QuickTime 7.6
- iTunes 8.1
- Java For Mac OS X 10.5 Update 2 1.0
- Mac OS X Update Combined 10.5.6
Reboot: 7.23G Used, 8.77G Free
- Installed Firefox 3.0
- Using AppZapper (running from a flash drive), I deleted the following apps:
- Automator
- Chess
- DVD Player
- Font Book
- iSync
- AirPort Utility
- Audio MIDI Setup
- Boot Camp Assistant
- ColorSync Utility
- Migration Assistant
- ODBC Administrator
- Podcast Capture
- RAID Utility
- Remote Install Mac OS X
- VoiceOver Utility
7.15G Used, 8.85G Free
- Installed available updates:
- iLife Support
- AirPort Client Update 2009-001 1.0
- Front Row Update 2.1.7
- Safari 3.2.1
- Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 3 1.0
- Security Update 2009-001
Reboot: 7.6G Used, 8.4G Free
- Ran Monolingual and removed all languages except English and English (United States)
Reboot: 6.09G Used, 9.91G Free - Ran Monolingual and removed all Input Menu languages
6.04G Used, 9.96G Free - Using Monolingual removed all architectures other than Intel
Reboot: 5.97G Used, 10.03 G Free
Of course, I can dig through /System and /Library to find others but I don’t think the gain would be great and I’m happy with having 8-10G free considering I can easily get a 8G SD flash card for additional storage.
” I can dig through /System and /Library to find others but I don’t think the gain would be great”
I think OmniDiskSweeper would tell you in about a minute that a good 30% is stuff like the Japanese language analysis dictionaries and multiple Java VMs that are probably superfluous for you. On a netbook you surely need only the current JVM. If you have iLife, then the Garage Band loops and the iDVD themes are huge, and again probably not important to you.