ipod capacity question

[john-paul]

i have a quick question regarding my new 4G 20GB ipod. first, a bit of background information - i was planning on buying an ibook this summer for my next semester at school, and when i saw the cram and jam rebate, i decided that the discount was too good to pass up. so i selected the ship seperately option, and of course, my ipod came days before my ibook. since i was anxious to get my ipod off the ground, i first formatted it on my older pc. there were no problems a few days later integrating it to my ibook, but when the latest ipod update was downloaded, i was forced to restore the settings because of the windows formatting. a bit of a hassle re-ripping my albums, but overall no big deal. however, after this incident, i noticed on itunes that the capacity didn't add up to 20 GB. sure enough, i power on my ipod, and go settings>about> and this is what it reads -
my name
number of songs
capacity 18.5GB
version 3.0.1

sorry for my first post to be a lame help post, but does anyone know whats happening here? should i try another reset to factory settings?

 

[Veldek]

That’s normal. It’s the difference between calculating the size in steps of 1,000 or 1,024. The harddisk has 20,000,000,000 Bytes, I think, which is about 18.62 GB. The rest is the preinstalled iPod OS.

 

[Demon Hunter]

That’s normal. It’s the difference between calculating the size in steps of 1,000 or 1,024. The harddisk has 20,000,000,000 Bytes, I think, which is about 18.62 GB. The rest is the preinstalled iPod OS.

Yeah, this is true of all hard drives. The definition of "gigabyte" when they sell it is different from the actual size of the disk. The entire industry gets away with it, for how long, who knows.

 

[john-paul]

well, well, it was just me being a bit too sensitive after all. thanks for making me feel a bit better.