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Got my new Imac with payed for a 500 gb Hd and got a 465.44gb
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Consider this, when you buy a 1TB HDD you'll get only this amount of HDD Space: 931.32257461248 GB
That's a: 68.67742538752 difference from 1024GB = 1TB actual! But that's how they'll market it, soon they'll have to give actual I would think.
That's a: 68.67742538752 difference from 1024GB = 1TB actual! But that's how they'll market it, soon they'll have to give actual I would think.
I'm gonna go a different direction and say that I thought that a hard drive always kept a certain amount of space in reserve so that when clusters go bad it can switch out the bad cluster for a good one that is kept in reserve, wouldn't this explain why you dont loose hardrive spce as your drive deteriorates?
So 500GB - 465GB = 35GB reserve space.
Anyone know about this?
So 500GB - 465GB = 35GB reserve space.
Anyone know about this?
web_god61 said:
Given that the math has been done earlier in the thread and it matched up perfectly, I would have to say... no. However, for the sake of it, this is from wikipedia's entry on hard drives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk#Capacity_measurements ) I think you'll find the last paragraph will dispute your idea:
Hard drive manufacturers typically specify drive capacity using 'SI prefixes', that is, the SI definition of the prefixes "giga" and "mega." This is largely for historical reasons, since disk drive storage capacities exceeded millions of bytes [4] long before there were standard 'binary prefixes' (even before there were the SI prefixes, 1960). The IEC only standardized 'binary prefixes' in 1999. As it turned out, many practitioners early on in the computer and semiconductor industries adopted the term kilobyte to describe 210 (1024) bytes because 1024 is "close enough" to the metric prefix kilo, which is defined as 103 or 1000. Sometimes this non-SI conforming usage include a qualifier such as '"1 kB = 1,024 Bytes"' but this qualifier was frequently omitted, particularly in marketing literature. This trend became habit and continued to be applied to the prefixes "mega," "giga," and even "tera."
Operating systems and their utilities, particularly visual operating systems such as Microsoft's various Windows operating systems frequently report capacity using binary prefixes which results in a discrepancy between the drive manufacturer's stated capacity and the system's reported capacity. Obviously the difference becomes much more noticeable in reported capacities in the multiple gigabyte range, and users will often notice that the volume capacity reported by their OS is significantly less than that advertised by the hard drive manufacturer. For example, Microsoft's Windows 2000 reports drive capacity both in decimal to 12 or more significant digits and with binary prefixes to 3 significant digits. Thus a disk drive specified by a drive manufacturer as a '30 GB' drive has its capacity reported by Windows 2000 both as '30,065,098,568 bytes' and '28.0 GB'. The drive manufacturer has used the SI definition of "giga," 109 and can be considered as an approximation of a gibibyte. Since utilities provided by the operating system probably define a gigabyte as 230, or 1073741824, bytes, the reported capacity of the drive will be closer to 28.0 GB, a difference of well over 7%. For this very reason, many utilities that report capacity have begun to use the aforementioned IEC standard binary prefixes (e.g. KiB, MiB, GiB) since their definitions are unambiguous.
Many people mistakenly attribute the discrepancy in reported and specified capacities to reserved space used for file system and partition accounting information. However, for large (several GiB) filesystems, this data rarely occupies more than a few MiB, and therefore cannot possibly account for the apparent "loss" of tens of GBs.
You can always show your solidarity by changing your signature from "20" iMac G5 - 2.1GHz - 2.5GB - 500GB" to "20" iMac G5 - 2.1GHz - 2.5GB - 465.44GB"cr2sh said:Hey dude.. I don't think it's cool to go around insulting people. First, the poor guy gets robbed by Apple's harddrive department.. and now you're calling him names.
I've seen people complain about Macs saying "Why did OS X take away x GB from my HDD, it was supposed to be y" e.g. 40GB turns into 37.14, they complain they're missing 2.86GB and its Mac OS X's fault/Apple's fault. When Windows does the same thing. Macs show you the actual and used HDD space automatically when you login and see the Macintosh HDD icon. Windows, you have to traverse menu's and all that to get actual HDD space.topicolo said:You can always show your solidarity by changing your signature from "20" iMac G5 - 2.1GHz - 2.5GB - 500GB" to "20" iMac G5 - 2.1GHz - 2.5GB - 465.44GB"
web_god61 said:
You're thinking of memory modules. Solid state memories usually have a little extra room because chip fabrication isn't a perfect science, and there's always a percentage of circuits that will fail. By including extra memory, chips that fail inspection can have bad areas removed (by blowing a fuse or something) and replaced with the backup. The extra cost is offset by the increased yield.
yeah my tibook has a 48gb drive, which with nothing but the OS installed shows up as 40gb, I imagine it was apple's small attempt at keeping people from asking this question.
Let me ask this, does the same apply with Flash Memory? I can't remember, but I think it does. I bought a 256MB Card and I think it was 244MB actual.dornoforpyros said:
*opens calculator*
Yup: 256MB = 244.140625 actual. So it does apply.
savar said:
The same is indeed true of hard drives. However, I believe any additional reserved space is not actually reflected as part of the drive's reported capacity.
It's what the 'I' in IDE stands for: Intelligent.
Many moons ago, hard disks were just dumb platters and heads. All the smarts were within the controller on the host computer. This would be responsible for (amongst other things) keeping a map of 'bad' clusters, and swapping-in spare healthy clusters. This function got moved onto the drive itself with the advent of IDE. Each drive leaves the factory with an internal record of bad areas and the additional areas to use in place of them.
This is all invisible to the operating system and also to the low-level software (BIOS, EFI, etc) which controls peripherals, and so is not shown in the figures reported to the user.
No ****, how does someone not know about this. This "problem" has been around for ever, and guess what, it even affects windows hard drives. Only Linux is safe.savar said:
Linux? Yeah right =P it takes up more space by making different partitions that you don't even know are there such as /home/ or /tmp/ lol I know you're jk, but anyways, a lot of people don't know about this. New computer users are the only ones I would think that don't know about this.jared_kipe said:No ****, how does someone not know about this. This "problem" has been around for ever, and guess what, it even affects windows hard drives. Only Linux is safe.
Even more depressing...
I received a "750GB" HD last week, and as could be calculated, it shows up as a whopping 689GB. Having a little bit disappear is annoying, but to see a claimed 60 gigs disappear from tricky math and marketing is almost bad marketing. Hopefully mfrs will begin to state "usable" GB. The whole concept reminds me of when I had to grasp the concept of having a 27" Television, with no single dimension of actually 27" usable...
-t
I received a "750GB" HD last week, and as could be calculated, it shows up as a whopping 689GB. Having a little bit disappear is annoying, but to see a claimed 60 gigs disappear from tricky math and marketing is almost bad marketing. Hopefully mfrs will begin to state "usable" GB. The whole concept reminds me of when I had to grasp the concept of having a 27" Television, with no single dimension of actually 27" usable...
-t
Anyway, what really matters is also that a HDD with "500Gb" is bigger than one with "250Gb" - that's what you go for, when you realize your "250Gb" is too small, and you need something "bigger".
The size of nowadays' HDDs is so big that you seldom go to buy a HDD with a clear idea in your head of how you want to fill it up to 240Gb or 250Gb. It might only happen with multiple partitions (Boot camp...), or heavy media files. And if I know I want to work on a total of 113Gb of raw video (practical example of my real need these days), I'll go for a HDD of at least twice that size, and I'll still think large above that number - because you need room to move a small cube inside of a big cube, that's my way of "seeing it", not even mentioning back-ups !
Now, if you really find yourself at the point where 7% of your hard drive of "250Gb" makes a difference between "satisfied" (i.e., enough room) and "not satisfied" (i.e., HDD full to the brim), I'd suggest you get a "500Gb", which will be better and safer.
Of course, money is an issue too: if all you can decently afford is a "250Gb", then you have to make the most of it. But well, welcome to the world of HDD's, and it's the same everywhere, not only Apple - go for a walk in the next electronic's shop, read the fine print -.
Additionally, the "ram" is out of this topic, because the labels on the chips usually are "512Mb", "1024Mb" - which is less of an error -.
The size of nowadays' HDDs is so big that you seldom go to buy a HDD with a clear idea in your head of how you want to fill it up to 240Gb or 250Gb. It might only happen with multiple partitions (Boot camp...), or heavy media files. And if I know I want to work on a total of 113Gb of raw video (practical example of my real need these days), I'll go for a HDD of at least twice that size, and I'll still think large above that number - because you need room to move a small cube inside of a big cube, that's my way of "seeing it", not even mentioning back-ups !
Now, if you really find yourself at the point where 7% of your hard drive of "250Gb" makes a difference between "satisfied" (i.e., enough room) and "not satisfied" (i.e., HDD full to the brim), I'd suggest you get a "500Gb", which will be better and safer.
Of course, money is an issue too: if all you can decently afford is a "250Gb", then you have to make the most of it. But well, welcome to the world of HDD's, and it's the same everywhere, not only Apple - go for a walk in the next electronic's shop, read the fine print -.
Additionally, the "ram" is out of this topic, because the labels on the chips usually are "512Mb", "1024Mb" - which is less of an error -.
cr2sh said:
I can't help but think that this "humble" comment has been provoked by the last post of the thread, i.e., mine.
It's funny how people think other opinions can be hilarious.
The subject of the calculation of "the exact amount of bytes in 250Gb" etc is more than well-known, I just wanted to add a different "user's point of view", which is of what you buy in the end and for which purpose.
Regarding the amount of room for video, I know my calculation looks terrible, but try to work with iMovie: a first DV-file, with your video import, that you keep as a backup because you might have some troubles along the way (and that's the point of back-up); then a copy of the DV-file, which becomes your video project; so far, out of 15Gb for one DV-movie, you already need 30Gb - because iMovie copies everything in the file -. Make it for 10 similar movies, you need 300Gb of HDD. Then try to apply several effects on a strip, and you might need to process intermediate movies, to reintroduce on the project. Hence the additional space. NB: You can extract the DV file from a backup iMovie file, to lighten it up, but I haven't tried to replace it by a new DV-import, I'm not sure it fits.
Furthermore, with several drives, you need even more room if you plan to move files around. "Oh, let's move the backups to drive 2", and you need another 150Gb for the time of the operation only.
Regarding the safe capacity, you should not fill your HDD over 95%, this is well-known.
But well, it is all too hilarious. I guess it is just a different point of view.
I think the comment about the 27" TV is the best way to look at it. That went for CRT monitors, too, a 17" CRT monitor was actually perhaps only 15.8" along the diagonal, viewable, the rest was hidden under the plastic bezel.
That didn't stop the term '17" monitor' from being a convenient way to classify the product. You could have 17" monitors from Apple, NEC, Sony, Daiwoo, etc. None of them would actually give you 17" viewable diagonals (and in fact probably none of them even measured exactly the same on what you DID get). But they were all 17" monitors.
It's the same way with hard drives -- a 500 GB drive is twice as big as a 250 GB drive, and a Western Digital 500 GB is the same capacity as a Fujitsu 500 GB drive. It's a convenient way to classify the size of the drive relative to the sizes of other drives. Is it deceptive math? Sure. Does it really matter? Only if you were picky...
That didn't stop the term '17" monitor' from being a convenient way to classify the product. You could have 17" monitors from Apple, NEC, Sony, Daiwoo, etc. None of them would actually give you 17" viewable diagonals (and in fact probably none of them even measured exactly the same on what you DID get). But they were all 17" monitors.
It's the same way with hard drives -- a 500 GB drive is twice as big as a 250 GB drive, and a Western Digital 500 GB is the same capacity as a Fujitsu 500 GB drive. It's a convenient way to classify the size of the drive relative to the sizes of other drives. Is it deceptive math? Sure. Does it really matter? Only if you were picky...
NZEditer said:
You paid for a 500 GB* hard drive.
*'GB' is defined as one billion bytes
Normal people (and computers) refer to capacities in binary. 1 GB to the OS is really 1*1024*1024*1024 (2^30, or 1,073,741,824.) 1 GB to hard drive manufacturers is 1*1000*1000*1000 (10^9 or 1,000,000,000.) That's a 7.3% difference. So a '500 GB' hard drive should only be 463.5 binary GB anyway. (There is a movement to use different prefixes for 'binary bytes', basically you just add a lowercase 'i' between the prefix and the 'B'. So a '500 GB' hard drive would translate to a '463.5 GiB' hard drive. While it is more accurate, I think it's a stupid idea.)
So your hard drive 'should' be 463.5 GB. You're seeing 465.44 GB. You're actually ahead.
If you don't like the fact that it's not 'really 500 GB', complain to the hard drive manufacturers. They've advertised drives this way for years. (My first hard drive was a 40 MB drive. It only showed up as 38 MB. Then there was my 540 MB model that showed up as 514 MB; and my 6 GB drive that showed up as 5.6 GB. That's just the way hard drives work. Heck, on the latest 700 GB hard drives, you 'lose' 50 GB of capacity. That's almost as much as the Mac mini comes with! Not to mention that the companies generally just round off anyway. One manufacturer's '500 GB' drive may only really be 498.6, another's may really be 501.3.
Then there are manufacturing differences and bad sectors. Kind of like how early LCDs were guaranteed to have a bad pixel or two, and it was just taken for granted, hard drives are pretty much guaranteed to have a few bad sectors. These bad sectors take away from the usable space. Not to mention just plain manufacturing differences. I have three Toshiba MK4025GAS 2.5", '40 GB' hard drives. All three have slightly different formatted capacities. And my desktop Seagate 40 GB hard drive is likewise a different capacity. (It's actually a little OVER 40 binary GB!)
Ooh, here's another thought.
Don't they do this to you when you buy gasoline, too?
Here in Canada there are signs on the gas pumps that say "volume corrected to 15 degrees C". So, in warmer or colder weather, you might not actually be getting the exact number of liters of gas that you think you're paying for.
Don't they do this to you when you buy gasoline, too?
Here in Canada there are signs on the gas pumps that say "volume corrected to 15 degrees C". So, in warmer or colder weather, you might not actually be getting the exact number of liters of gas that you think you're paying for.
notjustjay said:
Ouch. You guys already have to use undervalued C$, and smaller Litres, you also have to deal with that? Man, we get full gallons. The gasoline may shrink or expand in different temperatures, but you do get a full gallon (at present temperature.)
Mac" is not a company, and it's iMac, not Imac. lol i dont care k im not gonna call you a name tho thats uncalled for.
Thanks for all the info guys it helps alot im still trying to get what some of yous are saying but i get the point. Thanks again
cr2sh thanks for the support
Kind Regards Russel Crow
Thanks for all the info guys it helps alot im still trying to get what some of yous are saying but i get the point. Thanks again
cr2sh thanks for the support
Kind Regards Russel Crow