[yellow no.5]

I just got a new 15 GB iPod. It rocks. But it says I only have 13.2 GB of space in it. Is this normal? I did a quick search in the forums but couldn't find anything, so my apologies if it's been discussed already.

Thanks for the help.

Oh...I don't have anything on it yet, and there's nothing on it when I look at it in Firewire mode.

-yno.5

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

yes it is normal. All hard drives and even zips and floppies do this. It need that missing space for the directory information.

[chabig]

A 15GB hard drive stores 13.9GB of stuff because the drive is advertised as holding 15 Billion bytes, where a GB is 10^9 bytes. But the Finder reports using binary, where a GB is 2^30 bytes.

The rest of your missing space is iPod stuff that Apple puts on the drive where you can't see it.

Chris

[nbnz]

It's perfectly normal. My 30GB has 27.9GB capacity.
I just got my iPod last week too

[icruise]

Gee talk about FAQs... You'd think that computer manufacturers might mention something about this in the documentation for their products.

[nbnz]

Originally posted by Icruise:
Gee talk about FAQs... You'd think that computer manufacturers might mention something about this in the documentation for their products.

I have always thought computer manufacturers should actually work in the same way a computer would, why call something 15GB if it doesn't hold 15GB of computer data. I guess it looks better on the spec sheet.

[b00tang]

is this all just a marketing ploy? Or is there some real reason why this is done? I am just getting sick of it

[icruise]

Well, in some sense it is a marketing ploy (like CRT monitor sizes being considerably less than the "viewable area"), although as some have already pointed out, there is a reason behind it.

[nbnz]

Originally posted by Icruise:
Well, in some sense it is a marketing ploy (like CRT monitor sizes being considerably less than the "viewable area"), although as some have already pointed out, there is a reason behind it.

I know there is a reason behind it, but to use a different method of calculating the capacity of a hard drive for the specs than the way it's actually used is stoopid. But it's not like I really care...

[chabig]

You'd think that computer manufacturers might mention something about this in the documentation for their products.

They all do. But it's usually in a footnote and you have to read the fine print. Apple does it on their iPod specs:

http://www.apple.com/ipod/specs.html

See footnote 2.

Then check out every newspaper or magazine ad you see for a computer. There is always a lot of fine print, and one of the notes always says 1GB=1 billion bytes, or something to that effect.

Chris

[icruise]

Yes, but I mean something like an asterisk whenever they mention HD size, or slip of paper in the box or something, because this topic comes up at least once a week around here.

[Dan D.]

Most monitor manufacturers clearly state the viewable area on CRTs immediately after their size (e.g. 16" Monitor (15.2" viewable area)). Companies should do similar with total vs. usable HD space.

[chabig]

Yes. That might be a good idea. But on the flip side, the only way to know a monitor's actual viewable area is for the manufacurer to tell you.

With hard drives, it's industry standard to state capacities in decimal billions. And all you have to do to figure out the size in GB is to do the math.

I forget what it looks like, but I believe there is a standard abbreviation system not yet in general use that distinguishes between the decimal and binary meanings of the prefixes. So using this system, it's clear whether you mean decimal billions (10^9) or binary billions (2^30).

Chrisi

[chabig]

I found an explanation for the proposed system of abbreviations. In it, we would refer to decimal size as gigabytes (billion bytes) or gibibytes (billion binary bytes).

Chris

[bradoesch]

Computer manufacturers are always making things seems better than they actually are. They love saying a CD burner reads and writes at 40x, when it actually writes the majority of the disc slower, and reaches 40x at the outer edge of the disc (same with reading the disc.) They often show the maximum theoretical speed, and somehow forget to mention it's almost impossible to reach that speed. Ethernet, USB, FireWire, etc., usually won't reach their maximum theoretical speed under real world conditions.


Brad