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185Gbs for a 200Gb Harddrive?

Z

zabeth24

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 23, 2007
6
0
I ordered a Macbook a few weeks ago with a 200Gb harddrive. It shipped with a 185Gb harddrive. Since I am(/was) a Windows user I'm not exactly sure if this is correct. I assumed that it would ship with 200Gbs useable space with OSx taking up ~10Gbs. I can currently only access the 185. Is 15 Gbs reserved for a restore partition?

Does the 185 seem correct to you guys?

Thanks!
 
If you still have your PC, right click on the C: drive and see how much usable space it is listed as having. Then compare that to how much the box said the computer had.

This is the same thing as on PC's, iPods, and anything with a disk drive or flash memory. It isn't a scam, it's just the way to cookie crumbles.
 
itsme92 said:
This is the same thing as on PC's, iPods, and anything with a disk drive or flash memory. It isn't a scam, it's just the way to cookie crumbles.
Click to expand...

I think it IS a scam. Why don't suppliers tell you what you yield versus what you start with.

It's like getting a paycheck. They tell you you will make $52K a year. That's $1K a week. But when you actually get your check, it's for $600. :mad:
 
right, the industry should fix this, but it would have to be something that every manufacturer agreed on.

This wasn't a big deal when 1024 bytes and 1.0MB were considered identical. Scaled up to a Terabyte, that's a lot of lost space.
 
ok, let's get things straight - I'm not completely clueless about this. I am a Computer Science Major right now so I know how bytes work. Thing is, I have an HP which said it had a 100gb harddrive. It shipped with 100gbs. I understand that the larger a HD you order, the more off it will be. But, since all of the computers I have are shipped with the amount they are supposed to have, I was a bit confused when I was missing 15gbs.

If this seems reasonable to you, I won't complain. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't getting jipped here.

Thanks for the advice.
 
Every single Windows/Linux/Mac/Unix machine I have ever used has had the same hard drive measuring convention, where the usable drive space is "lower" than the manufacturer's specified size. For instance, my Dell laptop has a 80GB drive, which Windows reports as 74.5 GB (or GiBytes, as it should be called). I haven't used any HP machines, so perhaps HP does things differently.

I know the OP knows this, but it bears repeating. Since your drive is approx 200,000,000,000 bytes, you are indeed getting a 200GByte drive. The OS just reports it as seeming to be smaller. But you aren't losing any space. There's still 200x10^9 bytes. There's no scam, majordude.
 
You have the same amount of bytes, don't worry. It isn't a scam.

zabeth24 said:
ok, let's get things straight - I'm not completely clueless about this. I am a Computer Science Major right now so I know how bytes work. Thing is, I have an HP which said it had a 100gb harddrive. It shipped with 100gbs. I understand that the larger a HD you order, the more off it will be. But, since all of the computers I have are shipped with the amount they are supposed to have, I was a bit confused when I was missing 15gbs.

If this seems reasonable to you, I won't complain. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't getting jipped here.

Thanks for the advice.
Click to expand...

And if you can't understand plinden's post. Then maybe you will understand this...

Firstly, computers most basic level operates in base 2, which means, they are comprised of all 0s and 1s, and that is obviously called binary (Of course you are a CS major so most of this will be review but...), and it is easier for them to work with numbers that are 2^n, n being any positive number such as 8. But if you look at our number system, it is base 10 since it uses the numbers 0 - 9 that make up alllll the numbers, so naturally 1000 is easier to understand by us humans than 1024. So basically companies that make the harddrives are trying to make it easy (And probably for other reasons I am oblivious to) by saying a harddrive has 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) bytes, but when an Operating System looks at a harddrive, it doesn't think of a Gigabyte as 1 billion bytes, but instead as 1,073,741,824 bytes (Which is 2^30 or 1024^3). So if you take your harddrive, which is marketed as having 200,000,000,000 bytes and divide by 1,073,741,824, it should roughly equal the amount it says on your computer. So even though it SEEMS you are missing space, you really aren't =D.

And about your HP, they could have given it 107,374,182,400 bytes, so that when the OS looked at the harddrive, it read it as 107,374,182,400 / 1,073,741,824 = 100 GB.
 
Hard disk manufacturers just dont like to say their hard drives hold 184.343212341342314 GBs of space.

You cant blame them...
 
A gigabyte is not 1,000,000,000 bytes

Manufactures use the decimal notation, as this is a count 1,2,3,4,5... 1,000 and "equate" that to a KiloByte. but... 1,000 is not a KiloByte. A kilobyte is 1024 bytes. So 1,000 bytes is only 0.976 KiloByte.

1,000,000 bytes is not a MegaByte. A MegaByte is 1024 x 1024 = 1,048,576. So a million byte disk drive is only .953 MegaBytes.

1,000,000,000 bytes is not a GigaByte. A GigaByte is 1024 x 1024 x1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes. So we are now 73 million bytes behind!

The math on 200GB is: 200 * 1024 *1024 * 1024 = 214,748,364,800 bytes. For a vendor to supply a true "200GB" disk drive, it would have to have an additional 14.7 BILLION more bytes. As it is, they have 200 billion bytes. But that is only 186 GigaBytes.

Truth in advertising would be to call it a "200 Billion Byte" drive. But no one would buy that package...
 
Cintos said:
1,000,000,000 bytes is not a GigaByte. A GigaByte is 1024 x 1024 x1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes. So we are now 73 million bytes behind!
Click to expand...
Actually, 1,000,000,000 is a Gigabyte. 1024x1024x1024 is a Gibibyte.
1024 is 1 kibibyte, 1024x1024 is 1 Mebibyte
 
zabeth24 said:
ok, let's get things straight - I'm not completely clueless about this. I am a Computer Science Major
Click to expand...

Yes, yes you are. Having a major in computer science does not require an actual brain.

The difference between SI and binary prefixes is logarithmic
Click to expand...

That's why you get more """missing""" gigabytes as you buy larger hard drives.

EDIT: Mods, remove the nastiness in my first post, I don't care, but keep the fact that everyone doesn't understand this because it's a fundamental difference between a base ten and base two number system!
 
zabeth24 said:
ok, let's get things straight - I'm not completely clueless about this. I am a Computer Science Major right now so I know how bytes work. Thing is, I have an HP which said it had a 100gb harddrive. It shipped with 100gbs. I understand that the larger a HD you order, the more off it will be. But, since all of the computers I have are shipped with the amount they are supposed to have, I was a bit confused when I was missing 15gbs.

If this seems reasonable to you, I won't complain. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't getting jipped here.

Thanks for the advice.
Click to expand...

Hard drive manufacturers define 1 GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes; computers define 1 GB as 2^30, or 1,073,741,824 bytes. As a result, a 40 GB hard drive appears smaller on the computer.

It's always been this way; every PC or Mac I've ever bought. A 40 GB hard drive would have around 36 GB. A 250 GB hard drive would have around 230.
 
majordude said:
I think it IS a scam. Why don't suppliers tell you what you yield versus what you start with.

It's like getting a paycheck. They tell you you will make $52K a year. That's $1K a week. But when you actually get your check, it's for $600. :mad:
Click to expand...

You get 600 out of a 1000? Must be in a low tax bracket. :D
 
All the unnecessary calculations aside, just multiply the raw, unformatted HD space by 0.93 and you get the formatted capacity (this is very accurate for hard drives in the in the gigabyte capacity range - less so for hard drives measured by larger units).
 
You might want to recheck that HP, because I have a 250GB drive in my Mac, and another in my PC. Both say they're about 232GB. That 185GB has nothing to do with how much space the OS and apps are taking up. That's what size a 200GB drive is. They don't make a 185GB drive. Just like a 100GB drive is actually about 93.
 
kellah said:
hey now! you must have got your image of a CS program from a community college or something because legit programs are pretty intense.
Click to expand...

Sadly, no.

I have a roommate who is a TA for a mid-level Computer Science course, and he definitely just graded a project where someone used the non-existent "because" statement in a if loop.

And this is a very prominent university in Philadelphia that is well known for it's computer and engineering programs.

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GFLPraxis said:
Those naming standards are not yet official or accepted, however.
Click to expand...

They became an IEC standard in 1999. They became IEEE full-use standard in 2005 after a two-year trial period.

But yes, acceptance by hardware/software companies has been slow to non-existant.
 
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