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Clearing space on my new mac, help would be appreciated
- Thread starter rjsbass
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Things like GarageBand loops and iDVD themes take up several GB of space. If you're not planning on using those apps, you might think about getting rid of that stuff.
An 80GB hard drive, due to number conversion issues, is actually 74.5GB to start with, so that accounts for about 6GB.
Gigabytes are units using base 10...a GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes. This is how hard drive capacities are listed.
But computers think in binary units, where they consider a GB to be 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024 MB). But the computers are using incorrect terminology when reporting this info to users. What a computer calls a GB is actually a GiB (gibibyte).
The end result is that when you're talking about capacities in the GB range, your computer reports your drive as being only 93% of the size it actually is. But because everything else on the computer is also reported "incorrectly" by the computer, it is this "smaller" capacity that is relevant.
are companies false advertising? or are all capacities of programs relative to this conversion?
Think of it as paperwork. You can't just use every byte on your hard disk to store your data. You need to dedicate some of those bytes to keep track of things. The bytes on the disk get grouped into blocks, typically 4,096 bytes in size. That's 20 millions block for an 80 GB disk. You need to reserve some space to keep track of these blocks, like which ones are in use, and which ones are available.
Tilman
Tech specs for disk drives and computers usually have a little footnote when specifying storage space. Here is an example from the iMac tech specs on the Apple web site:
160GB Serial ATA(2); 7200 rpm
...
(2) 1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less.
Tilman
Well yes...your OS is engaging in false advertising by using the incorrect GB term. But it's the standard in the industry...all OS's that I know of do this. And trying to differentiate between GB and GiB for the general public would be horrible disaster. The vast majority of people never notice that what their computer is reporting as a GB is actually a GiB. And frankly, most of them couldn't care less, so I guess maybe ignorance really is bliss for most people.