1TB (orig. 990GB) now only 934 GB?

[lgtw]

I'm running a late-2009 iMac, and made a boot camp partition (tried to, at least) that was around 32-64 GB, and deleted it sometime in 2011.

I ran Disk Drill 2, and it didn't find any lost partitions, which makes since because I deleted it, and disk utility is showing 150 GB of free space for a second partition (if I wanted to make a new one), but I only have 105 GB free according to Finder.

Tl;dr
Used: 834 GB
Capacity: 934 GB
Able to make a 150 GB partition, but only 100 GB of free space, how can I get that 50 GB back?

Please help!

 

[swordfish5736]

I'm running a late-2009 iMac, and made a boot camp partition (tried to, at least) that was around 32-64 GB, and deleted it sometime in 2011.

I ran Disk Drill 2, and it didn't find any lost partitions, which makes since because I deleted it, and disk utility is showing 150 GB of free space for a second partition (if I wanted to make a new one), but I only have 105 GB free according to Finder.

Tl;dr
Used: 834 GB
Capacity: 934 GB
Able to make a 150 GB partition, but only 100 GB of free space, how can I get that 50 GB back?

Please help!

What does it say in disk utility for total capacity?


if you have a way to backup your stuff thru time machine or another way i'd say reformat the drive and see what its reading then.

 

[lgtw]

What does it say in disk utility for total capacity?


if you have a way to backup your stuff thru time machine or another way i'd say reformat the drive and see what its reading then.

For total capacity is says 1 TB

 

[jman240]

This is probably why

The difference in capacities is due to two different methods for defining what exactly the prefixes mega, giga, tera mean. In the computer world, these prefixes have different meanings depending on what exactly you are talking about. Hard drive manufacturers report the size of hard drives using the decimal definition of these terms (10^6, 10^9, 10^12 resepctively), whereas operating systems and other software use the binary definition of these terms (2^20, 2^30, 2^40).

As you can calculate, these values are close, but not exactly the same. 10^6 is 1,000,000, but 2^20 is 1,048,576. Once we get to larger hard drive sizes, the difference really becomes noticeable.

One gigabyte in binary is 1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30), but in decimal it’s only 1,000,000,000 bytes (10^9), which is a difference of 73,741,824 bytes (~70MB). So, when we're talking about storage size in gigabytes a hard drive's capacity as reported by the OS will be about 7% less than what is advertised by the hard drive manufacturer.

One solution to this is to talk about computer storage using Binary Prefixes so that there is no confusion about the exact amounts being talked about. In that system, a Gibibyte (GiB) is always 2^30 exactly. But, I wouldn't expect storage device manufacturers to adopt this method any time soon.

So assuming 7% loss due to the math you have 1,000,000,000 * 0.93 = 930,000,000

Apple changed the way they display sizes to compensate for this change. A 3.7GB thumb drive I have (technically 4GB) now shows up as 4GB in the finder.

 

[lgtw]

Sorry for the late reply:

When I first got my hands on this iMac in mid-2010, it had a 990 GB capacity.