I just got a 40 gig ibook but the thing actually only has 23 gigs available. The system profile show the hard drive to only be 37 gigs. Is this normal?
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40 gig ibook = 37 gig ibook?
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mikemodena
macrumors 6502a
Yes.. when companies sell products, they count a gigabyte as 1000MB, when in reality it's 1024MB. There's a disclaimer on the small print of the box if you look hard.. It's all a marketing strategy and you're always a couple gb less than what it says. For example, my 160GB HD is really 152.55GB. 😛
CoMpX
macrumors 65816
ibook2 said:
Yes, this is normal. When formatted, all hard drvides come out to be several gigs less than they say they are. This is perfectly normal. Also, your iBook comes preloaded with Mac OS X and many other applications that take up a lot of space. This is where some of your free space has gone.
Joe
Marketing vs Technical GB
In marketing terms a gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 (10^9) bytes.
In technical terms a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 (1024^3 or 2^30) bytes.
What happened is one disk company started marking using decimal MB numbers and all the other disk companies followed. (Made the disks look bigger.)
Of course, computers still use binary and so KByte=1024 and MByte=1,048,576.
In marketing terms a gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 (10^9) bytes.
In technical terms a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 (1024^3 or 2^30) bytes.
What happened is one disk company started marking using decimal MB numbers and all the other disk companies followed. (Made the disks look bigger.)
Of course, computers still use binary and so KByte=1024 and MByte=1,048,576.
jsw
Moderator emeritus
Actually, they usually count it as a 1000 million bytes, whereas 1000 MB is 1000x(1024x1024) bytes.mikemodena said:
So a company's "GB" is 1000x1000x1000 bytes (1 billion bytes) whereas a true GB is 1024x1024x1024 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes.
Thus, "40GB" in retail parlance is 40,000,000,000 bytes, or ~37GB.
A true 40GB would be 42,949,672,960 bytes.
Edit: See above... went to refill coffee while posting, got beat to the punch. 😉
FocusAndEarnIt
macrumors 601
I'm sure this already been said. But actual formatted capacity is less. On the Apple Store it says:
We all learn these things 🙂
EDIT: image is not loading, press control click and press open image in new window 😉
We all learn these things 🙂
EDIT: image is not loading, press control click and press open image in new window 😉
Thanks for the replies. I'm surprised at how much memory all the pre installed stuff takes up. My previous ibook only had a total of 3GB. So, having 23 GB to play with seems huge, even if its not 40GB.
This new ibook sure is a lot faster nicer better then my old one.
This new ibook sure is a lot faster nicer better then my old one.