185 GB Hard Drive Acceptable For 200 GB model?

[MacConvert2007]

Hello,
Got my first Mac yesterday. It is the black Macbook, and I paid for the 200 GB hard drive.

However, when I open the drive and select "Get Info" the maximum capacity of the hard drive reads as 185.99 GB. Is this an acceptable range of variation for a drive that should be 200 GB?

What should I do?

Thanks in advance.

 

[72930]

You're confusing Gigabits and Gigabytes

 

[x Shadow Dragon]

Hello,
Got my first Mac yesterday. It is the black Macbook, and I paid for the 200 GB hard drive.

However, when I open the drive and select "Get Info" the maximum capacity of the hard drive reads as 185.99 GB. Is this an acceptable range of variation for a drive that should be 200 GB?

What should I do?

Thanks in advance.

its because the operating system and stuff like that which takes up memory

 

[zioxide]

You're confusing Gigabytes and Gibibytes

fixed (i think)

 

[yetieater]

Hello,
Got my first Mac yesterday. It is the black Macbook, and I paid for the 200 GB hard drive.

However, when I open the drive and select "Get Info" the maximum capacity of the hard drive reads as 185.99 GB. Is this an acceptable range of variation for a drive that should be 200 GB?

What should I do?

Thanks in advance.

Some math to ease your qualms:

1 gigabyte is defined as 1,000,000,000 bytes. 10^9
Therefore, 200GB is 200*10^9 bytes
One kilobyte is defined as 1024 bytes, so your 200GB harddrive has 195312500 KB.
One megabyte is defined as 1024 kilobytes - dividing by 1024 yields 190734.86328125 megabytes.
One gigabyte is strictly defined as 1024 megabytes - dividing by 1024 yet again yields 186.264514923095703125 gigabytes.

No problem.

 

[zioxide]

Some math to ease your qualms:

1 gigabyte is defined as 1,000,000,000 bytes. 10^9
Therefore, 200GB is 200*10^9 bytes
One kilobyte is defined as 1024 bytes, so your 200GB harddrive has 195312500 KB.
One megabyte is defined as 1024 kilobytes - dividing by 1024 yields 190734.86328125 megabytes.
One gigabyte is strictly defined as 1024 megabytes - dividing by 1024 yet again yields 186.264514923095703125 gigabytes.

No problem.

Yes, and the hard drive companies base their measurements by saying there are 1000 megabytes in a gigabyte, so that's where the difference is.

 

[x Shadow Dragon]

Yes, and the hard drive companies base their measurements by saying there are 1000 megabytes in a gigabyte, so that's where the difference is.

wait seriouslY???? thats such a rip-off can anyone say false-advertising

 

[SC68Cal]

Apple stole your gigabytes.

 

[yetieater]

wait seriouslY???? thats such a rip-off can anyone say false-advertising

Read the fine print on any computer company's product pages. You get what you paid for.

http://www.apple.com/macbook/specs.html

See note one at the very bottom of the page.

1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less.

 

[72930]

fixed (i think)

What on earth are Gibibytes?

 

[yetieater]

What on earth are Gibibytes?

/me lols

 

[leprechaun8942]

I was wondering wtf was going on with my 2gb nano when it said it had 1.83gb of space when it was brand new.

 

[gauchogolfer]

/me lols

Take it easy, nerd-a-licious.

To the point, a Gibibyte is what some people are proposing as a way to refer to disc capacity in a way that removes the 1024 vs. 1000 byte kilobyte discrepancy, which is at the root of the confusion.

Wiki

 

[roker]

Just out of interest, why 1024? ie what determines that this must be 1024, rather than 1042, or 1234? Or, to make life easier, 1000?
You do feel a bit ripped off when you by a 320gb hard drive, and only get 299Gbs .

 

[dukebound85]

Just out of interest, why 1024? ie what determines that this must be 1024, rather than 1042, or 1234? Or, to make life easier, 1000?
You do feel a bit ripped off when you by a 320gb hard drive, and only get 299Gbs .

has to do with bits which can only read 2 states, a 0 and a 1. thus 2^10 is called a kilobyte =1024 bits
computers deal in a binary system so everything is 2^x

heres a link that supports this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte

 

[Counterfit]

Just out of interest, why 1024? ie what determines that this must be 1024, rather than 1042, or 1234? Or, to make life easier, 1000?
You do feel a bit ripped off when you by a 320gb hard drive, and only get 299Gbs .

Because 1024 is 2^10. Much easier for something that uses binary to deal with than 1000 (10^3)

 

[ef651100]

Just out of interest, why 1024? ie what determines that this must be 1024, rather than 1042, or 1234? Or, to make life easier, 1000?
You do feel a bit ripped off when you by a 320gb hard drive, and only get 299Gbs .

1 byte = 8 bits.

Data are stored as bytes, not bits.

Addresses (locations) in computer are addressed by address line - basically a bunch of wires which can be turned either on or off.

Say we have 8 wires.

By using different combinations of on's and off's you can get 2^8 combinations in total. That's 256. Thus this gives this simple computer 256 addressable bytes.

That has to do with RAM, but harddrives are similar.

Kilo means 1000, but in computer-world, 2^x is a better interpretation of units (like the example of addresses). 2^10 is the closest they can get to 1000, thus it is chosen to be computer's meaning of "Kilo".

 

[gnasher729]

Hello,
Got my first Mac yesterday. It is the black Macbook, and I paid for the 200 GB hard drive.

However, when I open the drive and select "Get Info" the maximum capacity of the hard drive reads as 185.99 GB. Is this an acceptable range of variation for a drive that should be 200 GB?

What should I do?

Thanks in advance.

Check out the MacRumors guide about Gigabytes and stuff.

If you look carefully in the Apple advertisements, you will see they say explicitely "1 GB = 1 billion bytes". The operating system, on the other hand, calculates 1 GB = 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes. If you multiply 185.99 times 1024 x 1024 x 1024, you will get quite exactly 200 billion bytes.

 

[ReanimationLP]

185 is about right for 200. My 250s format under NTFS to 232 GB, so I'd say the 185 is pretty accurate.

 

[adiosk8]

its 200 gigs unformatted and 185 formatted. Thats how drives always are. Applies to all hard drives. The larger it is, the more space you "give up".

 

[mkrishnan]

Apple stole your gigabytes.

This would make a great lolcat.

 

[damir.hara]

Hello,
Got my first Mac yesterday. It is the black Macbook, and I paid for the 200 GB hard drive.

However, when I open the drive and select "Get Info" the maximum capacity of the hard drive reads as 185.99 GB. Is this an acceptable range of variation for a drive that should be 200 GB?

What should I do?

Thanks in advance.

Its fine, no worries.

 

[stoid]

its 200 gigs unformatted and 185 formatted. Thats how drives always are. Applies to all hard drives. The larger it is, the more space you "give up".

Quite plainly, you couldn't have made a more inaccurate statement. Read the real explanation that has already been given about 6 times in this thread alone, not to mention hundreds (if not thousands) of times on this forum before you spout such disinformation!

 

[cube]

The prefix giga means 1,000,000,000

So the correct meaning of gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes.

If you want to say 2^30 bytes, use gibibyte.

Apple is wrong in not updating their notation in the GUIs (not for command-line programs, as changing that could break scripts, and geeks have no problem reading man pages to see what it is meant).

 

[unixfool]

The prefix giga means 1,000,000,000

So the correct meaning of gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes.

If you want to say 2^30 bytes, use gibibyte.

Apple is wrong in not updating their notation in the GUIs (not for command-line programs, as changing that could break scripts, and geeks have no problem reading man pages to see what it is meant).

But not all Mac users are geeks and most won't even know what a man page is.