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wgkealey

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 8, 2007
41
0
Does anyone know the formatted HD space of a MBP 120gig, like out of the box without any configuration?
 
The big out of the box killer for hd space for me was bootcamp. I opted for 20 gigs for windows space (apps and games) and its not enough. But that takes your mac space down to around 60 working gigs. Kind of tight, especially when working with very large iso's or hours long audio streams.
 
The actual space is always 93% of listed drive capacity, due to the "everyone uses 1024 except for hd manufacturers, who use 1000" lame excuse.

So, if you've got a 120gb drive, your real usable space will be 111.6gb. However it'll be less than that after you take into account the operating system, etc...
 
The actual space is always 93% of listed drive capacity, due to the "everyone uses 1024 except for hd manufacturers, who use 1000" lame excuse.

So, if you've got a 120gb drive, your real usable space will be 111.6gb. However it'll be less than that after you take into account the operating system, etc...


Mmm, what I did is completely reinstall the OS removing languages, printer drivers, and additional useless software (garageband), I had slightly over 100GB of usable space left.
 
That sounds about right. The default bloated Mac OS X install on my MBP was almost 20gb! After installing only the stuff I needed/wanted, I got it down to under 6gb.
 
The actual space is always 93% of listed drive capacity, due to the "everyone uses 1024 except for hd manufacturers, who use 1000" lame excuse.

So, if you've got a 120gb drive, your real usable space will be 111.6gb. However it'll be less than that after you take into account the operating system, etc...

When hard drives get into the Terabytes, it gets even worse, the actual useable drive space is roughly 90% of that reported by the drive manufacturers.
 
KB (1000 vs 2^10) = 2.4% loss
MB (1 Million vs 2^20) = 4.6% loss
GB (1 Billion vs 2^30) = 6.9% loss
TB (1 Trillion vs 2^40) = 9.1% loss

It sucks... By the time we get up to Yottabyte drives, the manufacturers will be screwing us out of 17.3%. That doesn't sound like a lot until you realize thats 190,016,926,000 Terabytes missing from counting by base 10! :p
 
While there may be something here, there really should be a MacRumor guide for setting up your brand new Mac. You can recover a lot of space by reinstalling OS X with a lot of the unnecessary system components omitted.

As for the "how much space is 120GBs specifically," this conversion that seemingly renders a disk smaller than advertized is true for all drives under all operating systems.
 
That sounds about right. The default bloated Mac OS X install on my MBP was almost 20gb! After installing only the stuff I needed/wanted, I got it down to under 6gb.

To be fair a large portion of that had to be from the iLife apps that are included on the install disc.
 
The actual space is always 93% of listed drive capacity, due to the "everyone uses 1024 except for hd manufacturers, who use 1000" lame excuse.

So, if you've got a 120gb drive, your real usable space will be 111.6gb. However it'll be less than that after you take into account the operating system, etc...

Wow. Thats exactly right. I was wondering the same thing... thanks. :)
 
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