So I've basically given up trying to understand why it's reporting in the way it is - the concern previously was of a bloated System file section, but that doesn't seem to be the case (and Finder proves that), so may be it will all get sorted in a future update! Is it normal that 'system' takes up 36 gb of storage? What does is contain? Can it be decreased?įrom my own experience I've found out that 'iTunes' (yes, I seem to have that showing in the left side) only reports size for Apps and Podcasts - my Music which is nearly 70Gb looks as though it's reported under 'System' (as you have found) which is currently at 83Gb - can't confirm because as you state it's greyed out, but all the other items on the left are far less in size so 'System' seems the only place the machine has found to report my music content.įurthermore, if I use Finder and add my actual Music size (70Gb) to Macintosh HD System and Library (8Gb + 5Gb) it gives 83Gb (what the greyed out 'System' is reporting).

Why does the system use 150 GB of storage? There are at least two previous posts regarding the same 'issue' (if in fact it is one!), but I'm not sure anyone has got to the bottom of it yet. The agent suggested reinstalling macOS Sierra, which I did, but it didn't solve the problem. Unfortunately Apple Support was not very helpful when I contacted them this afternoon. And I have no idea why it reports storage content accurately on my wife's Mac but not mine. I would like to be a huge fan of Optimized Storage, but this set-up of counting iTunes media as 'system files' seems problematic. And I still don't have a separate iTunes entry. When I move things back into iTunes, they count again toward the System storage amount. (The Documents content jumped up dramatically because I copied my iTunes Library to the Desktop.) Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to establish the separate entry for iTunes in this window. Now the System files are down around 8 GB. After I did that, my Storage report looked like this: As an experiment, I copied then deleted my entire iTunes Library from within iTunes. I could reach the iTunes folder through Documents on the left side, but the contents of the folder were grayed out. I also noticed that, unlike on my wife's MacBook Pro, I had no individual listing for iTunes.

In a nutshell: When I go to 'About This Mac > Storage' the System files were taking up a whopping 90+ GB of my hard drive. I've encountered a problem on my brand new MacBook, but haven't been able to find a solution after working on it for most of today.

What is included in mac system storage