New Macbook Pro Missing ~15 GB Hard drive

Hi, I recently bought a new 13" MBP that came with 160GB. After adding my documents, pictures, and music from my old ibook G4 to the MBP, I noticed there was some "available GB" missing. I added up my GB used and there is about 15 GB total that I cannot account for. Here is what I can account for:

Personal Folder: 2.5 GB
Applications: 4.21 GB
Library: 7.34 GB
System: 4.28 GB
Users: 29.68 GB

Total used: 48
Available GB: 96.03
Missing: 16
Stock: 160

Any idea where the 16 GB are, or if this is normal, or a problem? Thanks very much for any help you can offer.

Hi!

Welcome to the forums!
First thing to discuss is had drive sizes. HD manufacturers reports sizes based on actual amount of bytes, so if for a simple example, if a hard drive specified it stored 1K (for simplicities sake), it would store 1000 bytes. Software and computers relate the size of a drive based upon a power of 2, ie: 1024 bytes = 1K, so the software would say the drive is smaller then the box just because of a conversion factor. As a simple example - my hard drive is a "250 Gig HD" in my macbook. Disk Utilities shows me the total capacity in both raw bytes (250,059,350,016) and the equivalent Gigabytes (232.9) I've not lost anything, it's just a difference in representation. It'd be nice if the HD manufacturers followed base 2 convention since that is how computers display the size of drives - but they tend to like to make the HD look as big as possible, even if it isn't reported that big because of the conversion to base 2

Now the other factors that take place:

1) When you format a drive, some of it is lost in the formatting process to reserved space. The amount of reserved space is dependent on the filesystem used (since NTFS reserves space differently then Linux EXT or OSXs HFS+).

2) What you see to add up is not necessarily all there is - especially if you're pulling those numbers from the finder. The finder hides a lot of system files that Apple has deemed as not to be touched areas so they don't show them to you.

It doesn't sound like you're missing any real space.

Nethfel, thanks very much for taking the time to explain that!