200GB int HDD only 185GB?

Greetings... new to Mac but not new to drive technology... brand new MBP with "200GB" / 7200rpm int HDD... but Info on drive states max cap at 185GB... I know that all drives are never truly what they show for storage size, but losing 15GB??? Never heard of it... Could someone please tell me if I am crazy or if there may have been some mistake in the custom build... the OS is already accounted for because I have loaded nothing and I only have 167GB available...

Also, how does one know if the drive is truly 7200rpm... check manufacturer serial number against known spindle speed listing on web?

Please shed some light on these internal drive questions...

Thank you,

Bowen ~

Howdy,

Yes your drive size is correct. You will always lose a certain percentage of your drive space, not sure if it is due to formatting, partitioning, etc but you will always lose it with whatever machine or OS you are running, just a part of the beast. For instance, my 160 has 148.73.

As for telling the hard drive speed, you can go into about this mac and more info and get the serial number and drive model for your drive, and then check the manufacturers website.

Hope this helps some, and enjoy your MacBook Pro!!!

But an entire 15GB just gone???

Thanks for the reply and the info... I was aware that some space would be not there, but an entire 15GB seemed extremely excessive... Yay Hitachi!

thanks,
cjb~

This isn't actually just limited to your Hitachi drive, or I should say, the Hitachi won't have any less space than the other HDD manufactures - they all use the same messed up way of marketing their drives' capacity. This is sort of like the old "viewable size" versus "marketed size" on CRT monitors.

A drive marketed as a "200GB" drive is 200 billion bytes - apparently the marketers have never used computers, because to a computer, 200GB is 214,748,364,800 bytes, since 1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes, and 1 megabyte is 1024 kilobytes and 1 gigabyte is 1024 megabytes. So, while the marketers claim you have a 200GB drive, they are selling you a 200 billion byte drive, which once you do the math, equals 186.3 GBs of actual usable space that can be used by a computer.

I personally dislike this practice, but it appears that it is here to stay. Perhaps people wouldn't want to buy a 186GB HDD?

Also, remember that you imposing a file system onto the device, and that file system takes up a fair amount of space all by itself.

What you are seeing is very typical.

For example, my 250 GB hard drive shows up in Finder as 232.76 GB.

You lose upto 15GB to partitioning, formating or installing the actual OS on the mac.

You don't have ~7% of disk usage due to what digitalscrap described. After which you lose soon to the operating system, depending on what you install.