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huginn

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 18, 2007
3
0
Hello,

I have just received 24'' Al' IMAC with 320GB Leopard Installed and when I checked its capacity, it is only 297.77GB!

Is this normal?

Thank you a lot.
 
My MBP came with 20gbs knocked off. The hard drive is 320gb but the operating system + all the crap Apple pack on (fonts, different languages, iWork trial, MS word trial and so on..)
 
I find that annoying. Having all that space taken up. Just 'cos of the OS and iLife.

Thats not the whole story though. Hard drive capacities are measured using the metric system (or SI units), where the actual capacity of drives are actually based on exponentials of 2 (2^x). Its never perfect, no matter what drive you buy you'll never exactly get the advertised amount of storage. I'm sure someone will explain this in vastly more detail than I have though.
 
Garageband takes like 11 gigs all by itself. If you dont need/use it I suggest uninstalling to free up space

EDIT: and if youve loaded anything from your iTunes library, obviously it will take some of your space
 
Thats not the whole story though. Hard drive capacities are measured using the metric system (or SI units), where the actual capacity of drives are actually based on exponentials of 2 (2^x). Its never perfect, no matter what drive you buy you'll never exactly get the advertised amount of storage. I'm sure someone will explain this in vastly more detail than I have though.


yep, even when you buy an empty external HD, there is never full capacity. Try it. An 80 gig HD will only show around 76 gigs give or take
 
This is a screenshot of my 120GB MacBook HDD info in Disk Utility. It does have a capacity of 120,000,000,000 bytes, but because 1kB = 1024 bytes, I only have 111GB of useable space.
 

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Folks, this doesn't have anything to do with how much space is being used by the OS, if the total capacity is what's being quoted.

This discrepancy is because a GB the storage capacity of hard drives is using 1000^3 (one thousand to the third power) bytes, whereas a true GB, as reported by the OS, is 1024^3 (or 2^30).

Thus, 500 GB (advertised) = 500E+9, divided by 1024^3 = 465.66 GB (actual)

320 GB (advertised) = 320E+9 / 1024^3 = 298.0 GB (actual)

Read more here:

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

(EDIT: wow, while I did the math and typed that response I see that a bevy of others replied similarly)
 
Read this.

It will explain your missing Gigabytes ;)

It's funny, I always knew about this, but it didn't bother me until I bought a 320 GB external. My previous largest hard drive was just 200 GB, and I only had an 80 GB HDD in my laptop. The more GBs you feel like you bought, the more it punches you in the gut when you boot up. As the article says, the larger the drive, the larger the gap becomes. Ahh, math.

-Ado
 
How is it that people still do not understand the concepts of Base 2 and Base 10.

because they cannot do the math.

Which equates to about 7% less .

Sort of like filling the chip bags with air protects the chips and makes them look more full.
 
I just noticed that since the time that some of us posted links to the wikipedia article on Gigabyte above somebody has gone in and deleted most the article, including the entire "Consumer Confusion" section. You can view the most recent edits to see all the deleted stuff. What gives?
 
I just noticed that since the time that some of us posted links to the wikipedia article on Gigabyte above somebody has gone in and deleted most the article, including the entire "Consumer Confusion" section. You can view the most recent edits to see all the deleted stuff. What gives?

I can still see it :confused:



Edit: Just checked the history, it's been restored after an act of vandalism.
 
Yes, I just noticed that it was quickly reported as vandalism and restored. You can click on the History tab to see the trail of what changed, then changed back. Hard to keep up with this stuff.
 
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