Ordered a 250gig hdd, have 232 gigs?

Hi all, I just booted up my new mbp and it is glorious.

However I just checked my hdd space and it claims I have 232 gigs, even though I bought a 250 gig hdd. I know the OS and other stuff is on there, but how big is OSX? Also, I know in windows you can minimize the amount of space used by the Recycle Bin to maximize hdd space. Can that be done in OS X as well?

Thanks.

Right now, I've split my hdd into a 200 gig partition and a 30 gig partition (30 for windows gaming), so I'm hoping to maximize the 200 for os x to like at least 210, hopefully.

That's about right - after partitioning, installing the OS, indexing and everything else, you're about 18 gigs down.

If you're worried about the trash getting too big, just empty it regularly. You could set up an automator program to do this if you wanted.

ah alright. no biggie then. im glad i went for the 250 gig instead of the 200 then!

Actually, that 232GB is the total formatted size of the drive. Drive manufacturers claim to be selling you a 250GB drive, but they use a different computing factor than operating systems. So when you stick that drive into a computer, the OS will read the drive as having a lesser amount than advertised.

To be more specific, hard drive manufacturers calculate gigabytes in base 10 (i.e. 1GB = 1,000MB) whereas operating systems calculate it in base 2 (i.e. 1GB = 1024MB). So you can see why you seem to have "lost" some space.

Kash has it correct. This is all done mainly for marketing reasons, as much as it deceives the average customer (20GB is a lot to lose!). I thought I'd add in an amusing comic on the confusions surrounding such issues:

Discerptor.....HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA awesome !

Kash said:

Actually, that 232GB is the total formatted size of the drive. Drive manufacturers claim to be selling you a 250GB drive, but they use a different computing factor than operating systems. So when you stick that drive into a computer, the OS will read the drive as having a lesser amount than advertised.

To be more specific, hard drive manufacturers calculate gigabytes in base 10 (i.e. 1GB = 1,000MB) whereas operating systems calculate it in base 2 (i.e. 1GB = 1024MB). So you can see why you seem to have "lost" some space.

Click to expand...

Yep, if you want to confirm it in Terminal you can do a df -h (it'll show base 2) or df -H (which will show base 10)

I got a 500gb for my intel core duo imac and was shocked to learn I had lost so much.
its 465gb. If i had got the 1000gb for £89.99 ebuyer.com I would have about 930gb if lucky....

You didn't lose anything. It's simply a difference in how gigabytes are measured. Telecommunications is measured in base 10, and so too now are memory and hard drives. It's really the OS's alone that measure things in base 2.

This question comes up a lot. I and others have written guides about this too. You can see my "Reported Hard Drive Capacity" guide for more info and a calculator. As mentioned it is just a difference in the math used.

xstep said:

This question comes up a lot. I and others have written guides about this too. You can see my "Reported Hard Drive Capacity" guide for more info and a calculator. As mentioned it is just a difference in the math used.

Click to expand...

Good info. I love that drive space calculator on your page!

It's because of the format, Apple even got sued before because the iPod claims a higher capacity, but the suers obviously didn't do a research why this was so guess who won

Dysfunction said:

You didn't lose anything. It's simply a difference in how gigabytes are measured. Telecommunications is measured in base 10, and so too now are memory and hard drives. It's really the OS's alone that measure things in base 2.

Click to expand...

From a purely mathematical point of view, base 12 makes much more sense.

dtravis7 said:

Good info. I love that drive space calculator on your page!

Click to expand...

Thanks. There are a few around the web. I may have to update it soon to handle Terabytes soon.

I know it's been a while since the last post, but I have a follow up question to this thread. I also found that my new MBP showed that I had less GB than I had supposedly paid for (185 GB / 200 GB), but I read the 'Reported Hard Drive Capacity' article, and it seems that it shouldn't be much of an issue. However, out of the 185 GB that are free, it says I have used up 55.97 GB on the disk. Here is what I looked at:

Macintosh HD
Capacity 185.99
Available 130.02
Used 55.97 on disk

Everything on Macintosh HD (folders):
Applications 7.19 GB
Developer 8 Kb
Library 8.37 GB
System 4.14 GB
Alias 4 kb
Users 28.13

Excluding the 12 kb, that totals 47.83 GB, 8.14 GB are unaccounted for? Does anyone know what that 8 GB is being used up from?

Also, I recently cleared out an old external HD that says it holds 60 GB. Now it says it only holds 30 GB. What happened?

I think this might be a permissions problem and I know you are not looking at all the folders either.

A test against my Users was missing 1.8GB in the calculation. That seems to be because my regular account isn't allowed to read the Demo account which has that space used. So this could affect you in other areas too.

Second there are special Unix folders that do not show up in the Finder. For instance /var which on my system uses up 2.59GB of space.

See my last post on this thread. Oh, before executing that command, first cd /.

Thanks very much for your reply, xstep. I read the other thread too and downloaded Disk Inventory X... so I know where that other 8 GB went.

I wasn't exactly sure about the other external hard drive though, the one that should have been 60 but is now 30. Is there a way for me to recover the space that I should have had to begin with?

abandonite said:

I wasn't exactly sure about the other external hard drive though, the one that should have been 60 but is now 30. Is there a way for me to recover the space that I should have had to begin with?

Click to expand...

The only thing I can think of is to empty the trash. It isn't something I can diagnose well remotely.

Not sure whether this was answered earlier on- I'll confess that I skipped to the end after the first reply! On every HDD you won't have a full compliment of space because a sections kept to one side which records the use you've put it to, it's one of the ways that the police can recover data from you HDD.

Jof

LOL! That was funny.