Question about disk space

[ghall]

Okay, this is something I have been wondering for a while now, so I just thought I'd ask. I have an 80 GB hard drive on my MacBook Pro, but the Macintosh HD has only 74.21 GB. Where is the other 5.9 GB? I know it has something to do with formatting, but I'm not entirly sure why this happens.

 

[WildCowboy]

It has to do with the difference between gigabytes and gibibytes...computers and hard drive manufacturers see things differently. This question gets asked here a lot, so I'll direct you to another thread that answers the question a bit more thoroughly.

 

[ghall]

Thanks. It still doesn't make sense to me, but I kinda' get what it's about.

 

[WildCowboy]

It comes from the fact that 1 kB is equal to 1024 bytes...that's how your computer sees it. But hard drive manufacturers like to use base-10 systems, so they call 1 kB equal to 1000 bytes. So there's a 2.4% difference in capacity at the kilobyte level. But this error compounds itself as you continue to go up through prefixes...by the time you get to gigabytes, it's a pretty noticeable amount. It will only get worse as capacities continue to increase.