All of my 350GB Hard Drive isn't showing up?

[cis4life]

I just put in a 350gb hard drive into my macbook. Installed the OS and everything is working, except I'm only getting 297gb out of the 350 gb I bought?

What could cause me to loose over 50 gb of HD space? and can I somehow regain those lost gb's

 

[plinden]

First, you don't have 350GB (where GB is 1024x1024x1024 bytes) - you have 350,000,000,000 bytes, which is 325GB.

Then, presumably, you installed OS X and various programs.

28GB is a bit much for a clean install, so you probably have some user data on there?

 

[sickmacdoc]

I just put in a 350gb hard drive into my macbook. Installed the OS and everything is working, except I'm only getting 297gb out of the 350 gb I bought?

What could cause me to loose over 50 gb of HD space? and can I somehow regain those lost gb's

Well, I would imagine that part of the problem is that I believe you actually purchased a 320Gb drive for it (a very common size for laptop drives), as I do not know of any manufacturer that makes a "350gb" drive. 80Gb, 160Gb, 250Gb, 320Gb and 500Gb are the normal range for laptops.

You might want to take a look at the docs/box the drive came in first- and if that is the case re-do the math. Hope that is all it is.

 

[OllyW]

It is all explained in this excellent MacRumors Guide.

 

[GfulDedFan]

If it's a 320GB HD then 297.77GB total drive space is correct. You haven't been shorted by the manufacturer. It's merely a case of 2 different methods of denoting a size of a hard drive. The manufacturer uses a method of measuring the physical attributes and using the SI or metric prefix (base 10) the OS uses the binary prefix (base 2). For all practical purposes this kind of means that 1000 = 1024 which of course it does not. The difference when you get into Giga Bytes is roughly 7%. 320 * .93 = 297.6

 

[cis4life]

Thanks,

This makes sense. and yes, it was a 320 gb HD

Thanks for clearing this up for me,