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11GB for Panther?

S

sjcaguy

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 24, 2003
126
29
i'm typing this from my brand-new iBook, but I'm a little concerned about how much space Panther took up. I posted a thread recently about this issue, and was told Panther would take up about 3GB.
Right now, with nothing installed other than what came from the factory, I have only 49GB free on a 60GB HD.

What am I not understanding? I would think this is a little too much space to have taken up before I add any of my own stuff.
 
Most likely Panther is only taking up 3 GB. I'm not sure how hard drive manufactuers get away with this blatant false advertising in regards to the actual hard drive size. In the Apple System Profiler, under the left hand column there should be a heading for ATA where your optical drives and hard drive information is located. There you'll find the manufactuers name and the actual hard drive size. For instance why a 120GB HD in my mirrored door model is 115.04GB is beyond me. Maybe someone can clarify this confoozlement.
 
Re: 11GB for Panther?

Originally posted by sjcaguy

Right now, with nothing installed other than what came from the factory, I have only 49GB free on a 60GB HD.
Click to expand...

Part of the problem is that your "60GB" hd is only providing you with about 55.8GB of usable disk space (because of the space needed for HFS formatting and other overhead). So, In reality, the stuff on your disk is only using 6GB. If Panther really is only 3GB, I don't know where the other 3 have gone though ... probably in the Apps that were installed with the iBook.
 
Panther does only take up about 3 Gigabytes. However, the problem is that drive manufactures calculate their sizes with 1GB = 1000MB = 1000KB = 1000B. The problem is that 1GB = 1024MB = 1024 KB = 1024B. Therefore, the actual capacity is less than the advertized capacity. When it is formatted in HFS, HFS +, or a Unix formatting scheme - that also takes some room out of an already incorrect size label. :rolleyes:
 
Actually the space missing is from the conversion of the drive size. Drives are sold where 1000 bytes = 1k, where as in the binary code (they wanted a perfect square, and a number easily written in all 1s) 1024 bytes = 1k. See, because of the 8 bit = 1byte system, 4 sets of 8 1's ends up with 1024 instead of 1000. Because of this, it would be good practice to subtract 1.25 GB off of an advertized size per 10 GB. My TiBook has a 20GB hard drive inside, however it has a capacity 18.5 GB. Its not really a lie, more a miscommunication, really your computer has roughly 60 billion bytes available to write on, however, that only equals 54 GB.

Additionally, the drive headers, boot ROM, and drivers for the disk, usually take up < 1 MB, so blaming the size on that is incorrect.

I'd estimate that Panther really only takes up < 3GB, however the other software that is installed on "i" and "e" machines takes up a large ammount of space, plus your system's swap file which can be as much a 512MB for normal use.

Have fun with your iBook,


TEG
 
I still thinks it's false advertising. I paid for a 120 gig HD, not a 111.8 gig hard drive... 8.2 gigs of non usable space (before panther) is just crazy. They should have marketed this drive as a 110 gig drive. Then I could say the price was justifiable. See I made out with an extra 1.8 gigs.
 
When I first got my iBook it had about 3 GB off for pather so yeah thats right. Also I agree withj33pd0g. I paid for a 60GB hard drive, and I get a 56GB???
 
To all those who are saying "hey why do I get a smaller drive" stuff: I understand why it sucks and why you don't like it, but its not false advertising. Yes, the actual drive is 60gb or 120gb or whatever in physical space that the manufacturers measure. The problem with reporting "formatted" spaces (advertising a 56gb drive instead of a 60) is that the amount of space that is taken up varies a little. If you format a 60gb drive in NTFS you will get a different space then if you formatted multiple HFS+ partitions and added their numbers up, if that makes sense.
 
It is kind of aggrevating though. I was happily pleased when upgrading my old IBM Thinkpad harddrive, when I found that my "30 gig harddrive" was actually 35 to make up for the bloated XP os and included applications--IBM knows what's up (at least until the CPU sizzled out-leading to my purchase of a G4 iBook.)

The best option is to get an external HD & put all your media on it, and keep barebones iTunes & docs on the internal one.
 
Somehow I do not see a disclaimer on hard drives touting that you do not actually get the "advertised" amount. It seems that hard drive manufactuers love even whole numbers. When was the last time you saw a hard drive advertised for 113.3GB. You wouldn't buy a house that wasn't as large as advertised.
 
Originally posted by Gymnut
Somehow I do not see a disclaimer on hard drives touting that you do not actually get the "advertised" amount. It seems that hard drive manufactuers love even whole numbers. When was the last time you saw a hard drive advertised for 113.3GB. You wouldn't buy a house that wasn't as large as advertised.
Click to expand...

Er, as far as I've seen, hard drive specs almost always have that very sort of disclaimer. Just look at the tech specs of any Apple product on their site, e.g. the iMac's tech specs. Footnote (1) reads "1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less."
 
No, the problem is that the OS should stop reporting in units of 1024 (e.g. 1kB = 1024 Bytes). This has been covered to death elsewhere. :rolleyes: As for the original purpose of the thread, no, the poster's Panther installation did not consume 11GB.
 
Originally posted by ebow
No, the problem is that the OS should stop reporting in units of 1024 (e.g. 1kB = 1024 Bytes). This has been covered to death elsewhere. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
EXACTLY!

This topic seems to come up here about once a week, and as ebow said, if you want to complain to somebody, complain to Apple and MS for using "binary" representations of data instead of the proper decimal numbers. The HD guys are doing it right--G = billion, M = Million, K = thousand, NOT 1024, etc. Look at any physics textbook.

As for the original question, if you've got iDVD on there, that's another 1-2GB I think, and space gets eaten up by several other things.

Try going through and doing a get info on each folder in the HD--you'll see where the space is going.
 
Originally posted by kaosfere
For more background on this, and an interesting proposal for clarification, search Google for kibibyte.
Click to expand...
Way off topic, but I noticed that the OSX BitTorrent client actually uses KiB, MiB, and GiB (KibbiBytes, etc). First app I've seen that does that, and although it's a bit disorienting at first, at least it's honest.
 
Originally posted by Gymnut
Most likely Panther is only taking up 3 GB. I'm not sure how hard drive manufactuers get away with this blatant false advertising in regards to the actual hard drive size. In the Apple System Profiler, under the left hand column there should be a heading for ATA where your optical drives and hard drive information is located. There you'll find the manufactuers name and the actual hard drive size. For instance why a 120GB HD in my mirrored door model is 115.04GB is beyond me. Maybe someone can clarify this confoozlement.
Click to expand...

It's not false advertisement. Your system recognizes the Bytes differently than you do. you think a Gigabyte is 1000 MB and from a marketing standpoint that's a good estimate to go by. Your system goes by a Gigabyte as being 1024 MB. From a computer logic standpoint that's better for it. Now open Disk Utility, click on your hard drive and look to the bottom right. My drive says 37.3 GB which is over 40,007,761,920 bytes.

This is not false advertising. It's using a system like the metric system to determine sizes. Besides, it's easier to put 40 GB on the box than 37.3 GB.
 
Originally posted by iChan
my Panther installation only takes up 1.9 GB
Click to expand...
Not unless you customized the installation. A standard install is 2.9 GB.

For those who blame software manufacturers for the discrepancy, it is extremely illogical to report a binary number in multiples of ten. Yes, the metric prefixes were sort of hijacked by software engineers, but it makes infinitely more sense to count the majors prefixes in steps of 2^10.

It would be insane to implement prefixes of decimal numbers in powers of 2. Why should binary prefixes be implemented in powers of 10?
 
you can get rid of the foreign language support (and gain space) with Monolingual or Jetstream found on versiontracker.com

Some people say it saved them 650 mb
 
Another way to remove unneeded foreign language files:

Search the entire hard disk for files whose names include the string "lproj". Delete any files that are not your current language. It can save well over half a gigabyte of space, even if you never installed the foreign language packages to begin with.
 
Another way to remove unneeded foreign language files:

Search the entire hard disk for files whose names include the string "lproj". Delete any files that are not your current language. It can save well over half a gigabyte of space, even if you never installed the foreign language packages to begin with.

Caveat: Most languages have two possible names. One is full and one is abbreviated. To wit:
"English.lproj" and "en.lproj"
"French.lproj" and "fr.lproj"

And so forth.
 
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