After reformatting HD, a lot less space...???

[Jvhowube]

hey guys,

i had some horrible drive issues last week, so after waiting for the 'rents to send my boot disks, i reinstalled tiger onto my comp. it's working fine again, but for some reason, it formatted wayyyyy down. the drive is a 120 GB HD, and it formatted for 94.44 GB. in disk utlity, when i select the drive, it says "Total Capacity: 111.8 GB (120,034,176,118)" so it sees the 120 GB, but is calling it 111.8? This is kinda confusing! Could it be bad blocks on the drive? If so, does apple give me a new drive? Or what else could it be? there are no partitions or anything...

as always, thanks for your help.

-Jordan

 

[Rodimus Prime]

simple the 120 gigabytes is in base 10 or 120,000,000,000 bytes. Computers are base 2. 1 gig to a computer is 1024 megabytes which is 1024 kilobytes which is 1024 bytes All in all that adds to to be little less than 10% difference between the 2.
18
1 gigabyte to a computer is 1073741824 bytes. divide that into 120*10^9 bytes gets you a little over 111 gigs

 

[Jvhowube]

so drive manufacturers make a killing off of selling products with "120 GB" that actually is only 112 GB of usable space?

that seems silly.

ah well, thanks for the info!

now i just need to find the time to get all my original settings/files back onto my comp.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

so drive manufacturers make a killing off of selling products with "120 GB" that actually is only 112 GB of usable space?

that seems silly.

ah well, thanks for the info!

now i just need to find the time to get all my original settings/files back onto my comp.

Na I would not call them lieing or anything. They are reporting the number in a way normal people can understand. We think in base 10 so they are reporting the bytes in base 10. Problem comes in to play that computers think in base 2.

Plus it a heck of a lot easier to say 120 than 112. Again human like base 10 and numbers than come out in even 0 at the end. I do not have a problem with it because they are reporting the size of the drive in base 10 and that is what we all think in.


Oh and you are welcome. It is not the first time nor will it be the last time I have to explain this to someone. You have to kind of be a computer geek to just know it and it not to mess with your head when you first see it. And yes I get thrown a little when I look at the size of my 500 gig drive and the size was reported about 465ish and had to think about it.

 

[QuarterSwede]

Just remember that the larger the drive the more space you'll think you lost. At some point hard drive manufacturers will have to change how they market the size of drives because the difference will grow so large.