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Cheated on the Harddrive? - Printable Version

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Cheated on the Harddrive? - josntme - 11-08-2008

Ok, I received my new iMac 24" with 320 GB HD. But, the info says 297.77 capacity. Where did the 22.32 gigs go?

Is this really a 300 gig drive?

Thanks



Re: Cheated on the Harddrive? - WHiiP - 11-08-2008

http://www.glyphtech.com/support/diskcapacity.html


Re: Cheated on the Harddrive? - GGD - 11-08-2008

It's a difference in interpretation of what a GB is.

The drive manufacturers say that 1 GB of disk space is 1,000,000,000 bytes. The Mac OS says that 1 GB is 1,073,741,824 bytes. You have a 320 GB drive.


Re: Cheated on the Harddrive? - space-time - 11-08-2008

7% missing, that is 1.024^3-1


Re: Cheated on the Harddrive? - JoeH - 11-08-2008

That's just about right. This is where that disclaimer on hard drive sizes of them being decimal, i.e. 320 GB is 320,000,000,000 bytes, comes into play. Most memory and storage capacities listed on computers are binary, where 1 KB is 1024 bytes. So if you convert 320 GB in decimal terms to binary, it comes out close to 298 GB.

Related to this, here is a terminology specification out there that would mark binary kilos, megas and gigas with an "i" to distinguish them from the decimal ones. That would be KiB, MiB and GiB. But the terminology really has not caught on except with a small proportion of computer professionals.


Re: Cheated on the Harddrive? - GGD - 11-08-2008

JoeH wrote:
That's just about right. This is where that disclaimer on hard drive sizes of them being decimal, i.e. 320 GB is 320,000,000,000 bytes, comes into play.

I got a chuckle the other day when I saw this disclaimer "Actual usable memory capacity may vary. 1MB equals 1 million bytes; 1GB equals 1 billion bytes." The thing that made me laugh was that it was on the back of a package of Crucial RAM SO-DIMMs. RAM is the one case where sizes must be based on powers of two due to how RAM is addressed with row/column binary addressing.

I suspect that they may use the same packaging for USB Flash Drives.


Re: Cheated on the Harddrive? - ADent - 11-08-2008

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

320GB = 298 GiB


Re: Cheated on the Harddrive? - hal - 11-08-2008

some questions will never die


Re: Cheated on the Harddrive? - josntme - 11-08-2008

Well, I knew you lost some to formating but didn't realize so much.

I compared it to the iMac 24" 250 GB (that's being replaced) and it's 232.89 GB available. Now that's closer to what I had thought would be lost in formating.

So how much is actually available on a 1TB?


Re: Cheated on the Harddrive? - hal - 11-08-2008

930gb