HD capacity

just noticed on my new (3 wk old) 320gb MBP that capacity says only "297" (used is "27)

now, i know that they never give you the "full" space, but i don't remember it being that much less on my PC(s)...20gb seems to be a lot.

is this normal for a Mac?

thanks

It is not " Mac " related, it is just the way that HD manufacturers calculate the amount of storage. ( Base 2 or base 10 )

Do a search on this forum and you will find some posts with perfect explanations on how it is calculated.

Cheers ... McBie

thanks, McBie....

i was just surprised to see it off by 20gb. oh well....

The larger the hard drive the more it will be "off".

Manufacture consider a gigabyte to be 1000 megabytes when infact the computer sees it and reports it as 1024 megabytes (unless your using snow leopard which will report the size in decimals and not binary).

So your divide 1,000,000,000 advertised bytes by 1,073,741,824 binary bytes to give you .9313. This means you only get 93.13% of the advertised gigabyte. Therefore a 320GB will result in approx. 298GB, (istat pro widget reports my 320GB hard drive as 297.8GB).