Is this normal?

[Beowulf666]

So i bought the black macbook model, and i bought it with it's basic 160 GB hard drive. I looked at my comp information today and saw this:

Capacity: 148.73 GB
Available: 125.85 GB

Is this normal? Shouldn't it say 160 GB, not 148.73?

Thanks.

[skyrider007]

It's normal. Did it come with Leopard pre-installed or you had to update it yourself?

[Blue Velvet]

When marketing much hardware such as hard drives, they are usually advertised using the less common standards-based definitions of space, ie where 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. However, in mainstream use, 1 GB = 1073741824 bytes (or 1024^3). This has the effect of making a hard disk appear larger than it actually is; for example, a hard disk advertised as 120 GB will be shown by the operating system as only a 111.76 GB disk (as 120 x 10 ^ 9 = 111.76 x 2 ^ 30). Care must be taken to understand which definition is being used in the context of the situation.

http://guides.macrumors.com/Bits_And_Bytes


This question gets asked once or twice a week on MacRumors. That's why I'm closing this thread.