Hard drive space...

[GulfVetSAF]

OK, I'm curious why my hard drive is only showing as 185.99 GB when I purchased a 200 GB drive. If you all remember I had a macbook before my new macbook pro (the macbook is going to my son for his birthday in July) and it was the same thing on there (except I had a "100" GB HD on the macbook).

Thanks for input in advance!

Scott

 

[trpnmonkey41]

Humans count in decimal form, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
Computers read in binary form 0's and 1's

1 gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 bytes in human/decimal form...but for a computer 1 gigabyte = 1,073,741,824 bytes (1,024 mb)

The difference between the two is 73,741,824 Bytes

For each Gigabyte that a drive manufacturer claims, they are over reporting the amount of disk space by 73,741,824 Bytes or roughly 70.3 MB of disk space. So, if a manufacturer advertises an 80 GB (80 billion bytes) hard drive, the actual disk space is around 74.5 GB of space, roughly 7% less than what they advertise. And in your case a 200 GB drive 14.1 GB of space is lost because of the manufacturers using a different counting system.

This is not a Mac specific problem, if you were to get a 200 GB drive for a PC or a 200 GB external drive you would also get 185.99 GB

 

[RiDE]

Because mfg's advertise hard drive space as 1000 MB per GB... when it is ACTUALLY 1024 MB per GB...

They really sold you 200,000 MB.... which is just 195GB... the other 9 GB is used by the OS and the Apps that are pre-installed.

EDIT: See trpnmonkey41's post above... much more detailed.

 

[GulfVetSAF]

Thanks for the quick replies... should have known the answer to that one.

 

[awg0020]

I have a similar problem, however it isn't so simple. I purchased a 500GB Seagate External HD over a year ago and used it with my Windows laptop, and then with my Mac Mini and Macbook (after I came to my senses). However in this time I partitioned it to use it as a storage and backup. The problem is that the total capacity is now at 372.6 GB, nowhere close to the ~480GB capacity that it used to have. Is there anyway to recover the lost space or is it just due to age and over-formatting? Thanks!