does OSX take-up about 40 - 50GB's???

My iMac has a 500GB drive... but straight outta the box it was alread down to around 465GB (approx.) I have downloaded a few 3rd party apps... VLC, Mack the Ripper, Adium, aMSN, etc.... as well as 50GB of music, and I'm already down to about 390GB available...

Does this seem about right?

RIDE said:

My iMac has a 500GB drive... but straight outta the box it was alread down to around 465GB (approx.) I have downloaded a few 3rd party apps... VLC, Mack the Ripper, Adium, aMSN, etc.... as well as 50GB of music, and I'm already down to about 390GB available...

Does this seem about right?

Click to expand...

My "250gb" iMac's actual capacity is 232.89. Almost all hard drives use higher rounded numbers as advertised nominal capacity. It's a lie, of course, but sorta close.

Click on the blue apple icon at the upper left of your screen. Select "about this Mac". Click "more info". Under "hardware" in the left column, click on "serial-ATA" and it will show your drive's actual capacity. I have little doubt it will be something less than 500. I suspect you're fine.

Ok here is some Al Gore 'Fussy Math'

1 GB actually = 1024 MB
1 MB actually = 1024 KB and so on

When you buy a 500 gb HD they calculate it based on 1 bite = 1,000 kb and 1 mb = 1000 kb and so on.

Its an age old way of giving you less, but telling you your getting more.

if you go here http://personal-computer-tutor.com/abc3/v30/vic30.htm

and put in 500 billion (500,000,000,000) in under bytes you'll see you have 465 GB.

asolo said:

My "250gb" iMac's actual capacity is 232.89. Almost all hard drives use higher rounded numbers as advertised nominal capacity. It's a lie, of course, but sorta close.

Click on the blue apple icon at the upper left of your screen. Select "about this Mac". Click "more info". Under "hardware" in the left column, click on "serial-ATA" and it will show your drive's actual capacity. I have little doubt it will be something less than 500. I suspect you're fine.

Click to expand...

Here is a picture of what is found in the "about this Mac" window...
I know the capacity is not going to be 500GB... I just figured it would be a little closer than 465GB....

You can also see that my iTunes library is about 50GB... so even from 465.. I would think I'd have a bit more than 393GB available.... not a huge deal by any means... I'm just curious.
/Users/HOME/Desktop/Capacity.jpg

/Users/HOME/Desktop/Itunes.jpg

Can someone help me with adding images??? I clicked the "insert image" icon in the reply page, then I dragged th image over... but I guess that's not right.

Just to let you know, Garageband takes up about 2-3 gig, so if you don't use that (like me) go ahead and uninstall it. I also deleted a lot of languages off of my computer using a program, which I can't remember the name of right now, does anyone remember it?

delocalizer

HDD manufacturers do tell lies tbh. 500 Gig should be 500 gig but its not, its 488 sadly. Like your iPods, mines 30 gig but its not .

todd51 said:

I also deleted a lot of languages off of my computer using a program, which I can't remember the name of right now, does anyone remember it?

Click to expand...

I used Monolingual, and it freed up 35 or 40 gigs. I use it every time there's a software update, too.

Be careful with it, though, because there are four or five versions of some languages, including English. I read somewhere that to keep English, for instance, you should keep all the versions of it or things could get wonky, maybe with the software updates.

Double-check the list to make sure you haven't killed a version of English before deleting the languages you don't need. Don't know if the same thing could happen with DeLocalizer.

It's been covered a bit already, but when manufacturers state the capacity of their drives (hard drives, flash drives, memory sticks, blank DVDs, iPods), it's in decimal (1 gig = 1,000,000,000 bytes).

However, computers use binary (1 gig = 1,073,741,824 bytes). Long story short, for every advertised gig, you actually lose around 70 MB going from decimal to binary. Unfortunately, unless they fix this marketing BS, people will continue to be mislead about this.

So in your case, 500 x 70 = 35,000, or roughly 35 gig. That's why your HDD is only ~465 gig. OS X certainly doesn' take that much room.

And yes, my MBP's '100 gig' drive is actually ~92 gig.

My 60gig HD is actually 55.6...

my "120 gb" is really 111.47 gb

the "40" gig in my ibook is actually a 37.

I downloaded "delocalizer" and I freed up 3 gigs, not too bad...