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is this normal for external hard drives? (it says 750gb but only 690gb shows up)??

charlestrippy

charlestrippy

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 29, 2006
386
0
Tampa, Florida
Hey - I just bought the Seagate Freeagent 750gb


I formatted it to the Mac OS Extended Journaled but it says the total capacity is 698gb....

I know hard drives aren't the exact number(size) as advertised but is it just me or does the loss of 50gb seem excessive?



If i was to just "Erase" and click the button "Erase free space" and have it write zero's - would that free up a little more of the "lost" 50gb?

or do you think the drive is faulty and I should return it?

thanks! :confused:
 
You typically lose about 10% of the "advertised" space every-time you format a drive. This happens mainly because of the differences in calculations that is used. Technically 1KB is not 1000 bytes but 1024 or 2^10 bytes so when you format the thing, it gives you the "actual" space minus all that is needed to store the "organising stuff" as floptical put it :)
 
darkcurse said:
You typically lose about 10% of the "advertised" space every-time you format a drive. This happens mainly because of the differences in calculations that is used. Technically 1KB is not 1000 bytes but 1024 or 2^10 bytes so when you format the thing, it gives you the "actual" space minus all that is needed to store the "organising stuff" as floptical put it :)
Click to expand...


oh, okay - so everything is fine on the drive - considering that situation...
there isn't a way to get more like "erase free space" or anything?

well, at least i have 698gb to play with haha
 
flopticalcube said:
Thats normal. You lose some space in formatting as the files system needs to "organize" the space. My 120G drive is actually 111G usable space.
Click to expand...

You might think that but that's wrong. It's the 1024 thing instead.

Basically 750GB on the box = 750,000,000,000 Bytes

which gives 732,421,875 KBytes (K =1024Bytes)
which gives 715,255.7 MBytes
which gives 698.49 GBytes

Which is what the OP is seeing!
 
Nope, because that's really the free space that's available to you. There was a big issue a few years back where consumer's began complaining that they weren't getting the space that was "advertised" especially when drives started becoming bigger and bigger. I mean, 10% of 1GB ~ 100 megs right, doesn't seem that much. But 10% of 750GB ~ 75GB o_0 That's where people started going "hang on, what happened to my space" :p

The more technically correct term for measuring space is KiB or kebibyte, MiB or mebibyte and GiB or gibibyte. Sounds cute I know but you can read it here

And yeah, 690GB's of data is wicked man. I need to get me a bigger external HD as well:rolleyes: All them family guy episodes are taking up my precious space, not to mention all the anime :p
 
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