Same # bytes, yet .07 GB different in size?

Anyone care to have a guess at why?

RONE said:

Anyone care to have a guess at why?

Click to expand...

Just a guess, because math was never my forte - but there's 1024 bytes in a kilobyte, 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte and 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte. Of course, this gets more complicated if we use the formula that hard drive manufacturers use that states that there's 1000 kilobytes in a megabyte. But I believe the rest of the industry uses 1024, since there's 8 bits in a byte.

RONE said:

Anyone care to have a guess at why?

Click to expand...

There is no difference in size.

1 gigabyte = 1073741824 bytes


19665999979 ÷ 1073741824 = 18.31538973283

Going by the first decimal point, they are the same. It all comes down to how the final number is rounded off. Depending on what system is running that drive, the rounded-off estimate could differ. Both of the rounded figures you show are correct, based on the simple math calculation I have shown. The only difference being how the decimal was rounded.

Why is the rounding showing differently? It's hard to say. From the icon previews you are showing, those are two different folders. These could be two different drives or two different pieces of hardware. There are also two differnt times for each folder. One time it could have rounded to a lesser decimal, the other time by more decimals.
Keep in mind that while the rounded-off estimate for GB is different, the byte count is the same.
That is what is important, not the rounded figure.

These two folders are indeed on different drives (I was transferring all my music to my external drive, and wanted to make sure the file sizes were the same after the transfer). The "smaller" GB file is on my MBP, and the "larger" GB file is on my seagate external drive.

After posting this question on another forum, here is the reply I received (if anyone is interested):

trevor said:

Because they are on different hard drives, with different block sizes. When things are stored on hard drives, they are not stored one byte at a time, they are stored in blocks. So unless the number of bytes is an exact multiple of the block size, you will always have some wasted storage space.

Different drives that have a different block size will result in different amounts of wasted space, hence the difference you see above.

Trevor

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