free hd space not jivin'

[Huck31]

so i have a pre unibody 17" c2d 2.5ghz mbp.
Just received my new 15" high res and am going through and wiping my old one to pass on to my inlaws.

I removed the boot camp partition through bc assistant. It saying i have a 175 gm hard drive but its a 200 gb

when you look at the drive info it says 174.. gb (200,000,00... bytes)

why are those two numbers not jivin' its driving me nuts.

 

[spinnerlys]

Snow Leopard uses the base 10 to show file sizes, so 200.000.000.000 bytes get reported as 200GB, while Leopard using the base 2 would show it as 186GB (= 200.000.000.000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024).

Have you taken a look at Disk Utility?



Hard Drive Size Discrepancy

Why does my new 500 GB hard drive report it only has 465 GB? Have I been ripped off?

No, you haven't been ripped off. 500 GB = 465 GB, strange as it seems.

The reason is that computers count a "kilo" something as 1024 (binary 2^10) while the rest of the world count a "kilo" as 1000 (decimal 10^3). A 'mega' in computer binary system is 1024 x 1024 = 1,048,576 (rather than decimal 1,000,000), and a 'giga' is 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,073,741,824 rather than decimal 1,000,000,000

This creates a discrepancy of approximately 7% between the number of GB the computer reports, and what is advertised as the drive's capacity in GB. It is important to note that there is no difference in the number of actual bytes of storage - it is only a difference in reporting when the binary 'giga' terminology is used.

A 500 GB hard drive has about 500,000,000,000 bytes (it is never exact, commonly a drive is designed to have more bytes, to allow for a certain number of defective sectors to be mapped out). When counted on the computer, 500 Gb (decimal) = 500 billion bytes = 465.66 GB (binary).

Some propose using a different term, gibibyte (GiB) for the binary figure, however that is unlikely to catch on in the marketplace.


More information is at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_drive#Capacity_measurements

stolen from http://guides.macrumors.com/Hard_Drive_Size_Discrepancy