Cheated on the Harddrive?

[josntme]

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

[WHiiP]

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

[GGD]

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.

[space-time]

7% missing, that is 1.024^3-1

[JoeH]

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.

[GGD]

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.

[ADent]

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

320GB = 298 GiB

[hal]

some questions will never die

[josntme]

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?

[hal]

930gb