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Beliyaal

macrumors member
Feb 14, 2008
53
19
Nope, any amount of formatting or erasing the drive will not work as it makes 60 billion bytes available.

I like how they added a disclaimer that the article about how hard drive space is calculated does not apply to the Air. :)

If you do not have an SSD, please refer to this article for a detailed description of why the discrepancy occurs with HDD.
 

ViperrepiV

macrumors regular
Jan 25, 2008
198
26
ugh this is so annoying. just need an explanation here....or a replacement drive with the actual space.
 

mspman

macrumors regular
Jun 7, 2007
236
76
Minneapolis, MN
I'm a little :mad:. I mean, this is a 15% discrepancy between the stated value and the actual value. I work in IT - do you realize what would happen if I ordered 1TB of disk space but was only delivered 850GB? I'd be returning it!
 

whozurdaddy

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 4, 2008
14
0
Anyone tried the Apple fix in the document above?

I have a SSD MBA that should arrive any day now. I'm anxious to try it out.

The "fix" has been tried by multiple people including myself. Reinstalling Leopard does nothing. The capacity shown during the Disk Utility reformat is 55.9GB (60,011,642,880 bytes). Of course it's nice to remove the 3.4 GB of printer drivers... but it doesn't change the capacity of the drive.
 

clayj

macrumors 604
Jan 14, 2005
7,648
1,384
visiting from downstream
The "fix" has been tried by multiple people including myself. Reinstalling Leopard does nothing. The capacity shown during the Disk Utility reformat is 55.9GB (60,011,642,880 bytes). Of course it's nice to remove the 3.4 GB of printer drivers... but it doesn't change the capacity of the drive.
Yep, he's correct. The first thing I did when I unboxed my MBA was to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X clean, which saved me about 7 GB of disk space. The SSD formatted drive capacity did not change.
 

whozurdaddy

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 4, 2008
14
0
Nothing new...

I'll call Apple again. The SSD Air has been out a month now. Maybe tech support has more information.
 

akm3

macrumors 68020
Nov 15, 2007
2,252
279
I can't believe this issue isn't *exploding*. If people will sue over iMac 20" screens only having a zillion colors instead of a brazillion, I'm sure a missing 5gigs on an already VERY tight space constraint AND misleading advertising should be causing an absolute frenzy.

It seems Apple is just getting a pass on this one.
 

aristobrat

macrumors G5
Oct 14, 2005
12,292
1,403
IMO, the difference between is that Apple made specific claims about the 20" iMac screens that the hardware obviously wasn't capable of performing.

With the MBA, they make no specific claims about formatted capacity. All I've seen them say is "Actual formatted capacity less".
 

krye

macrumors 68000
Aug 21, 2007
1,606
1
USA
It's definitely a different drive. My drive is listed as a MCCOE64GEMPP with a capacity of 55.9 GB and Anand's is a SAMSUNG PZA064 SSD with a capacity of 59.63 GB.



I'll call Apple tomorrow. I don't want to whine here, but this is BS. Every gig counts when you're talking about an SSD drive. I paid for a 64GB drive and Apple sold me a 60GB drive.

...never mind. I'm lazy today.
 

Beliyaal

macrumors member
Feb 14, 2008
53
19
IMO, the difference between is that Apple made specific claims about the 20" iMac screens that the hardware obviously wasn't capable of performing.

With the MBA, they make no specific claims about formatted capacity. All I've seen them say is "Actual formatted capacity less".

The issue here isn't formatted capacity. The unformatted capacity is 60 GB not 64 GB. If some news site would just point out this issue I'm sure it would explode. The fact that the CPU doesn't run at more than 1.2 GHz for more than seconds without disabling the power throttling is also of the same magnitude.
 

whozurdaddy

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 4, 2008
14
0
I've been told by Apple multiple times that this is "normal". I'm not sure what else to do.
 

RichardF

macrumors 6502a
Oct 27, 2006
565
78
New York City
I just received my MBA (1.8/ SSD) yesterday and saw this thread today while researching where my "missing space" is.

This thread deserves a bump.
 

alanmoon

macrumors newbie
Apr 15, 2009
1
0
Same as me...

I've had the same issue; referb mac book air and only getting 55.9GB.

Spoke to the support department and they referred me to:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2734?viewlocale=en_US

Manage to get escalated and felt that something could have been done if it wasn't a referb but as it was managed to get £100 credit put back on to my account - better than a poke in the eye and no hassle really...
 

akm3

macrumors 68020
Nov 15, 2007
2,252
279
We now understand why this is.

SSD's not only take the hit in that capacity is advertised in base 10 but formats in binary base 2, but they also hold a percentage (generally around 5-10%) of the SSD cells in reserve to help with cells that go bad, wear leveling, random writes, etc.

All SSD's do this and you have the capacity but it isn't available to you.
 

ayeying

macrumors 601
Dec 5, 2007
4,547
13
Yay Area, CA
We now understand why this is.

SSD's not only take the hit in that capacity is advertised in base 10 but formats in binary base 2, but they also hold a percentage (generally around 5-10%) of the SSD cells in reserve to help with cells that go bad, wear leveling, random writes, etc.

All SSD's do this and you have the capacity but it isn't available to you.

Bingo. My 256GB ssd is only 234GB formatted. its technically missing 2GB from actual value. If you add up the binary, it comes out to a "254GB" ssd.
 

whozurdaddy

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 4, 2008
14
0
Wow, this thread is still active?

Good post akm3, BUT that still doesn't explain why Anand's drive showed a 60GB capacity.

The plot thickens. In the anandtech review his Samsung disk not purchased from Apple has 59.63 GB Capacity and is formatted to 59.31 GB. What do you see in your system profile?

Check screenshot at the bottom of the page

Not that I care any more... I've moved on from the Air, but still it's strange.
 

akm3

macrumors 68020
Nov 15, 2007
2,252
279
Good post akm3, BUT that still doesn't explain why Anand's drive showed a 60GB capacity.



Not that I care any more... I've moved on from the Air, but still it's strange.

Likely he had a slightly different firmware on his Samsung drive and they tweaked it slightly before going mass market.
 
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