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Richard8655

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Mar 11, 2009
2,027
1,497
Chicago suburbs
Just received the latest Mac Mini with 320gb hard drive option. When I check "About this Mac", it shows a max capacity of 298.09gb. I feel ripped for 22gb. Anyone know what gives?
 
there are plenty of threads about this sort of thing, and it seems that the OS takes up a significant amount of space, and the fact that it comes in so many languages. i've often heard MR users to do a clean install of OS X, though i don't know how because i don't own my own Mac sadly!

oh and there's always the dumb calculations from megabytes to gigabytes and what not.
 
Ah yes, of course, I recall this now. This can be confusing for the casual or non-technical user/purchaser. I agree, better terminology that describes this situation would be helpful. Thanks.
 
I've personally done calculations with every HD I have connected to a Mac and formatted as HFS and have discovered that HFS formats the available space to approximately 7% less than the advertised amount.

For example:
500GB becomes 465.4GB
1TB becomes 931.2GB
40GB becomes 37.1GB
 
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