Snow Leopard Upgrade Significantly Freed Up Hard Drive Space

[imac9556]

I upgraded from Mac OS 10.5.8 to Mac OS 10.6 using the upgrade function. Is it possible that it freed up THIS much space?! (About 20GB+)

http://img213.imageshack.us/i/before.png/

http://img508.imageshack.us/i/afterj.png/

Everything too, is much more "snappier"

Nevermind...read below

 

[Ivan P]

I upgraded from Mac OS 10.5.8 to Mac OS 10.6 using the upgrade function. Is it possible that it freed up THIS much space?! (About 20GB+)

http://img213.imageshack.us/i/before.png/

http://img508.imageshack.us/i/afterj.png/

Everything too, is much more "snappier"

Apple has changed the way the OS reads the disk capacity, it reads 1GB as being 1000MB. Previously it read 1GB as 1024MB. You haven't 'gained' space, it's just being represented differently. I hope that helps

 

[kryptonianjorel]

So now if you download a "1 GB" program, it will read as 1.07 GB (if i did my math correctly) so actually, all of your programs got fatter

KiB to KB conversion: 2.4% bigger
MiB to MB conversion: 4.9% bigger
GiB to GB conversion: 7.4% bigger
and so on.

The "GB" of yesteryear is now GiB, representing 2^30 bytes, and now the GB is 10^9 bytes.

Sucks

 

[imac9556]

Thanks guys, Sorry for the excitement for nothing!!

 

[sidewinder]

Read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1541

This article explains the difference and why it has become more of an issue today.

S-

 

[uaecasher]

you will be able to utilize all disk space but also files will be bigger, so don't freak out when windows users send you a file and it's suddenly bigger ^_^

 

[NeverhadaPC]

why change the GB/GiB? What to gain? ?

 

[Ivan P]

why change the GB/GiB? What to gain? ?

Possibly to stop people that aren't computer-savvy from complaining that their "250GB hard drive is 'really' only 234GB" - to most people, if the OS shows their 250GB HDD as 250GB, then they're happy.

 

[kryptonianjorel]

why change the GB/GiB? What to gain? ?

Easier than trying to stop the HD manufacturers from being cheap/greedy/deceiving

 

[sidewinder]

Easier than trying to stop the HD manufacturers from being cheap/greedy/deceiving

Let's not go overboard here. They are not being "cheap/greedy/deceiving".

The entire hard disk industry has been advertising drive size using kilo = 1,000 and mega = 1,000,000 from the beginning. The floppy disk world did the same thing. DRAM was always kilo = 1,024 and mega = 1,048,576.

Storage and memory are different so it is not surprising there is a difference. Storage used "kilo" and "mega" in the traditional (base 10) sense. This is what happens when try to use base 10 terms in a base 2 world.

S-

 

[mike...]

This is really annoying. Is there any setting to make the OS report GBs as GiBs?