iPod iPod Classic Capacity

[disco stu]

I recently got a new 160GB Classic. After initial setup on a Mac, it said that the capacity is only 149GB of storage. Is this normal? I can't imagine that the software takes up over 10GB of space on the hard drive. I previously had a 2nd generation 10GB iPod, and the software took up less than 1GB of space. Thanks for the help and input.

 

[SLC Flyfishing]

It's an issue that all hard drives face, the capacity after formatting is never exactly as advertised, the larger that hard drive the more it seems to be off. It's a percentage thing though, you have about 6.8% less than advertised my first gen Nano had 9.3%less (but that was only 250 megabytes). My 80 gig classic's actual formatted capacity is 9.2% less than it's stated to be, I've only got 74.2 GB in actuality.

If you have any other iPods or your friends do, check into it they'll all be different. It looks as if you got lucky with yours though since in my experience ~9% is typical.

You can also check this out with external HDD's or thumb drives or anything else like that.

SLC

 

[robbieduncan]

It's to do with the never ending difference between the way computer makers and hard drive makers count. It's nothing to do with the software: that's held in flash ROM.

 

[killmoms]

Hard drive/flash RAM manufacturers count their gigabytes in decimal, where a billion bytes = 1 GB. But that's not how computer data is stored, nor how computers address the space available on a drive. They use binary, which works in powers of 2. So a kilobyte is actually 1024 bytes, not 1,000. A megabyte is 1024 * 1024 bytes (1,048,576 bytes), not 1,000,000, and so forth. As you can see, that error adds up pretty quickly.