[chrissss]

hi
ive had a new imac for a month now and the hard drive usage seems to be to high considering i havnt realy done anything much on it yet. i have checked the sizs of all folders and it just doesnt add up! out of my 80 g 's i now have left 57gigs my folders add up to aroung 15 gigs including the operating system, has anyone got any ideas what is going on,
thanks chris

[Dex13]

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/

Download the free trial, and scan you hard drive, it will give you a read out of every file on your man, and how big it is.

[iPoder]

For disk drive manufacturors, 1 GB means 1,000,000,000 bytes. For OS (Windows or Mac), 1 GB means 1024x1024x1024 bytes. So, 80 GB hard drive will only give you about ~74 GB real disk space.

It is a screwed-up formula because 80 GB HD contains 80,000,000,000 bytes, which is approximately equivalent to 74 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 (74 GB).

Then you have fragmentation on your hard drive. So even if the total size of your files take only 15 GB based on Get Info, it consumes 17 GB of disk space. (Each file must take an integral number of disk sectors, which is 4K by default. For example, if a file is only 1 byte, it will take up 4K of disk space. That is where the discrepancy comes from).

So, it is normal. Mine does the same thing.

Edited: I forgot to mention that some directories are not shown on your Finder, such as Unix directories /etc, /var. To find them, you have to open a terminal, and do "cd /etc". But usually you don't need to worry about those directories.