[cejones]

I bought a IBM 75GB harddrive and after formatting it in Mac OS X, it shows up as a 70.12 GB drive. What has happened to the other 5 GBs?

I understand that this may be something to due with the difference between a 1024 GB and a 1000 GB, but if that were true, I would expect the 75GB drive to show up as a 73 GB drive...

Any ideas?

I wrote to IBM support and they responded with :

"Due to the format taking up space and the conversion of a byte and
megabyte, the actual useable space is slightly less than the advertised
space. It is comparable to buying a 2MB floppy disk and formatting it.
After formatting the disk, you only get to use 1.44MB's of that disk. The
same thing is happening with your hard drive only on a larger scale. I
hope this helps."

Sounds like crap to me... They define a "slightly less" capacity as 5 GB?

[yagballs]

IBM's response to you is in fact true. I have a 60GB GXP Deskstar and about 59GB is available after formating. However I am suprised at the amount of overhead the formating process takes though. 5GB... thats a lot...

[G4ME]

what form did you format it in UNX or HFS+ I think that might make a differance.

[TazmanDman]

Basically as a general rule you can take approx. 10 percent off the advertised price and that's what you get in actual HD space...

The iPod is advertised as 5gigs but actually has 4.6 in usable space....

Hope that helps



-Taz

[yagballs]

Correction, out of 60GB, after formating I can only use 57GB.

[Paul S]

I also have an IBM 75GB and it reads right around 71GB (don't remember exactly what it was).