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MK25toLife

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 7, 2007
253
1
I'm not sure how flash memory works, I know with a HD you loss a little space . Can someone let me know exacly how much space is on the Shuffle? Thanks!
 

overanalyzer

macrumors 6502a
Sep 7, 2007
909
0
Boston, MA USA
I'm sure there's software that takes up some space. Plus all storage devices are labeled based on base 10 calculations, i.e. 1 GB = 1000 MB, 1 MB = 1000 KB, etc. but actually it's 1024. So the actual size is always smaller than marketing labels. That's why you see the notice about size calculation on all hard drives/computers/electronics. So it should be a bit smaller than 1GB.
 

yg17

macrumors Pentium
Aug 1, 2004
15,027
3,002
St. Louis, MO
I'm not sure how flash memory works, I know with a HD you loss a little space . Can someone let me know exacly how much space is on the Shuffle? Thanks!

Flash memory is the same as hard drives, with the less-than-advertised capacity for the reasons overanalyzer stated.
 

Yvan256

macrumors 603
Jul 5, 2004
5,081
998
Canada
It's because storage (hard drives and flash) are usually in base-10 and SI units (i.e. kilobyte = 1000) and computers are in base 2 (i.e. kibibyte = 1024, even though most software still wrongly use the term kilobyte when referring to 1024 bytes).

Explanation.

There's also the fact that flash memory can get have/develop bad blocks over time, thus lowering the capacity (i.e. one iPod shuffle may have 970 MiB, another one 965 MiB, etc).

As an example, Finder tells me that my iPod shuffle (2nd generation) has a capacity of 967 MB. Disk Utility, on the other hand, tells me 968.0 MB (1 015 021 568 bytes).
 
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