[Rumor]

I got my MBP with the 200gb HD option. It arrived today and I set it up to find that there isn't 200gb of data storage available.

Currently, I have 168.16gb free, this is after deleting the free trials. System profiler says that the HD size is 186.31gb, where is the other 14gb?

[Dakarʒ]

I'm fairly certain a 200GB drive never comes with 200GB, though I am not certain if it can come with as high as 13 GB missing. probably.

[peeb]

This is to do with measurement of mbs, and file indexing. File system record keeping and tables takes a certain amount, and the 1000 / 1024 scam take a lot!

[Rumor]

A gig or two I expected, just not close to 14gb. That seems excessive.

[Dakarʒ]

My 250 GB at work comes in at 232.76 GB

[JustinHorne]

Originally Posted by Rumor 

A gig or two I expected, just not close to 14gb. That seems excessive.

No, it isn't. It has to do with how hard drives are mearsuerd and such, it is like that on pretty much every hard drve out to buy.
My 120 in my MB is 111, I think, and my 500 gb external formats empty to 468. That's just what happens.

[shabbasuraj]

ya ^

[Cold Warrior]

My 160 GB in my MBP C2D comes in at 149.1. When the HD is selected in disk utility's first aid tab, the Total Capacity field will show that 149.1 GB figure, but in parenthesis it will show the 160 in bytes.

[ginoledesma]

As the others mentioned, it's how hard drives are measured. The OS/computer measures it differently from the way the manufacturers do it. Mac OS X measures it in powers of 2, whereas manufacturers tend to measure it in powers of 10. That is, manufacturers follow the SI measurement that kilo is 1,000, but computers follow the binary measurement of kilo being 1024.

A gigabyte is measured by manufacturers as 10^9, whereas computers define a gigabyte to be 2^30. With this, you'll arrive at the following:

Manufacturer: 200GB = 200 x 10^9
Computer: (200 x 10^9) / (2^30) = 186.2645

There are subtle differences in the way each OS computes it, though. See this wikipedia article for more info.

[mduell]

You lose 7GB per 100 to the base10/base2 conversion... so that shiny new '1TB' drive is really only 930GiB!

[ghporter]

200 billion bytes is NOT 200 gigabytes, but that's the way drives are marketed. The difference is from the difference between "binary thousands" which are actually 1,024, and "decimal thousands" which are exactly 1,000. 1024X1024X1024 = 1073741824, and so 200GB is actually 214748364800 bytes.

This is really just a "fine print" issue, like when the jeweler says "this is a one carat diamond" when industry standards say that it can be as little as 0.98 carat or up to 1.02 carat (though they'll emphasize if it's over).

[Jasoco]

My MacBook's so-called 80GB HD holds 74.21GB. My 250GB FireWire HD holds 232.76GB and my 500GB USB HD holds 465.64GB.

Shame, but what are you gonna do? I just wish they had kept this in mind and marketed the things as 74GB HD's and so on. Not 80 before formatting. Oh wells.

[ghporter]

Doesn't "80" sound better than "74?" We're talking about marketing here. Besides, when you format a drive, you generally lose a lot more than the difference between billions of bytes and gigabytes.

[Dakarʒ]

Yeah. It's still BS companies can advertise such things.

I have yet to figure out why wireless routers advertise max speed in Mbs but your internet connection is rated in Kb.ps

[Eriamjh]

Where TF have you been? It's been this way for years.

[Cold Warrior]

Originally Posted by Dakarʒ 

I have yet to figure out why wireless routers advertise max speed in Mbs but your internet connection is rated in Kb.ps

My net connection is advertised and rated in Megabits per second. Cable, 3 Mbps. Also, the routers also act as a LAN, so Mbps is a sensible figure.

[Dakarʒ]

I think tells you how long its been since I've been shopping for internet. Thanks.