Phantom HD Space from my Time Machine?

[Laurencia7]

I just bought a new HD 500gb to put my time machine on, and it has 34 GB of phantom space. I have 84GB being used for my files, but yet 34GB of unknown space. Is that for the program itself?

Or did I do something wrong in setup.

 

[Guiyon]

What do you mean "phantom" space? If you are not using Snow Leopard, 34GB almost exactly matches the Kilo/Kibibyte mismatch, in which case this is completely normal and no, you are not actually missing any space.

 

[iBookG4user]

What version of Mac OS X are you using?

 

[Laurencia7]

Phantom means it isn't attached to anything I can see. Invisible.
I am using Mac OSX Leopard.
So it is normal for it to use that much GB space that is not reserved for actual files? I just want to make sure I get the most GB from the drive.

 

[Guiyon]

Phantom means it isn't attached to anything I can see. Invisible.
I am using Mac OSX Leopard.
So it is normal for it to use that much GB space that is not reserved for actual files? I just want to make sure I get the most GB from the drive.

Actually, you ARE seeing the full capacity of the drive; there is nothing missing there. Drive manufacturers measure drives by using 1000 bytes per KB, computers measure drives using 1024 bytes per KB. Technically, you have the same number of bytes in both systems.

For example:

500GB * 1000^3 = 500,000,000,000 bytes
500000000000 / 1024^3 ≈ 465.66GB
500 - 465.66 = 34.34

This is "fixed" in Snow Leopard as Apple redefined the size of their kilobyte to be 1000 bytes instead of 1024 so the drive would show up as 500GB (minus formatting overhead).

Edit:
Keep forgetting this link: How Mac OS X reports drive capacity

 

[Laurencia7]

so in other words, instead of 500GB of space, I had 465, then using 83 for time machine. I have 382?

 

[Xavier]

so in other words, instead of 500GB of space, I had 465, then using 83 for time machine. I have 382?

You got it.

 

[Laurencia7]

Thanks.