Available hard drive space on a new iMac

[Pearl79]

Just bought a new iMac with a 360G hard drive. System profiler shows capacity is 298G (277G available with pre-installed Windows and Parallel).

Does that sound right? I know the true space available on a formatted hard drive is never the official size, but it's been a long time since I bought a big machine so I don't know if 17% is normal.

[Dmac77]

There are two different ways that HD space is advertised, a computer system sees the size in bits, and HD space is advertised in bytes. bits are smaller than bytes. therefor a 320 gb drive will actually be about 10% less than it really is. It is stupid, but the government says it's OK for companies to do this. If you want more info read this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_Overhead

Don

[Vader]

That is much more space missing than should be, My 500 gb drive actually holds 465 gb.

I think you should re-read the specs, as the size you are reporting is exactly correct if it was a 320gb drive. My 320gb MyBook holds 298.1gb.

[flopticalcube]

Firstly, you have a 320GB drive. iMacs don't come with 360GB drives. Secondly, read this:

Hard Drive Size Discrepancy (http://guides.macrumors.com/Hard_Drive_Size_Discrepancy)

[Pearl79]

Firstly, you have a 320GB drive. iMacs don't come with 360GB drives.

You're right. Apparently it's just a typo on the invoice.

Thanks to all for the input.