[samsontan]

few weeks ago my mb 60gb HD died. Wasn't running at all so decided to replace it..

now, with my 160gb, its working capacity is at 148.73gb! This is perhaps normal i suppose?

NOTE: my mb was since sep of 06 - so it'll be 2 years old come this sep!

[OreoCookie]

There is nothing wrong with your drive, it's for marchitectural reasons: operating systems such as Mac OS X and Windows calculate memory space in powers of 2^10 = 1024. 1 kB = 1024 B, 1 MB = 1024 x 1024 B = 1048576 B, 1 GB = 1024 x 1024 x 1024 B = 1073741824 B.

Harddrive manufacturers have -- some time in the 90s, right around the time storage capacities of drives started to be measured in GB -- switched from this way of counting to counting powers of 10. 1 GB is really 1000,000,000 Bytes to them. They did it to `make their drives larger.' As you can see from above, the difference is about 7 %. If you add these 7 % to 148.73 GB, then you'll see it's pretty much 160 GB, as advertised.

[samsontan]

Thanks, I was just reconfirming.. you might have answered this questions countless of times.

But thanks macNN for giving me such an easy and accessible community network.

PS. heartbroken with my lost files on my 60gb drive

[OreoCookie]

You should get an external harddrive for backups. They are cheap (prices starting in the double digits), much cheaper than a broken heart