Just bought my brother back in the UK a 2nd. gen. black iPod nano 8GB as a Christmas gift. Before shipping it home, I hooked it up to my MacBook and saw that the actual capacity of it was just 7.50GB! Now, that won't be a problem for him, but after using his nano, I was toying with the idea of buying myself one of the smaller capacity models. What's the actual available storage on the 2GB and 4GB models straight out of the box? Do they show less memory than they're supposed to have, or is what I'm seeing with the 8GB model a consequence of it having a hard drive rather than the flash memory of the smaller nanos?
If anyone can fill in the blanks for me, I'd appreciate it:
nano size________available storage
8 GB_____________7.50 GB
4 GB_____________?
2 GB_____________?
Regardless, I'd like to know what the ACTUAL storage capacity of each nano is before I decide to buy one for myself. Thanks!
Mac OS X reports hard drive capacity in binary math, hard drive manufacturers report capacity in base 10 math
Modern operating systems such as Mac OS X use binary mathematics to define the total capacity of a hard drive. Using binary math, an 80-gigabyte (GB) hard drive reports approximately 74.51 GB of available space.
In binary math, 1 GB is equal to 1,073,741,824 bytes, whereas conventional (or base 10) mathematics instead calculate 1 GB as exactly 1,000,000,000 bytes.
This numerical discrepancy (73,741,824 bytes per gigabyte) represents a difference between the physical “base 10” specification used by hard drive manufacturers and Mac OS X’s binary measurement of available capacity. The 80 GB and 74.51 GB values represent two methods of mathematical measurement that describe a hard drive with approximately 80 billion bytes.
This is normal behavior, and there is no hard disk space missing. Regardless of which method is used to measure total capacity, the storage capacity in bytes of the hard drive is the same. Previous operating systems (including Mac OS 9 and earlier versions) also demonstrate this mathematical difference.
Other factors, such as the system software, applications, updates, and your files and data use part of the available disk capacity, meaning a new Macintosh computer will not show the total capacity listed as available for use. The amount of hard disk drive space required for normal operation of a Macintosh computer will vary widely, depending on configuration, model, and personal requirements.
Note: Hard disk manufacturers may also round off decimal places when stating storage specifications, such as approximately "39.5 GB" instead of "39.49 GB".