Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Nope, any amount of formatting or erasing the drive will not work as it makes 60 billion bytes available.

I like how they added a disclaimer that the article about how hard drive space is calculated does not apply to the Air. :)

If you do not have an SSD, please refer to this article for a detailed description of why the discrepancy occurs with HDD.
 
ugh this is so annoying. just need an explanation here....or a replacement drive with the actual space.
 
I'm a little :mad:. I mean, this is a 15% discrepancy between the stated value and the actual value. I work in IT - do you realize what would happen if I ordered 1TB of disk space but was only delivered 850GB? I'd be returning it!
 
Anyone tried the Apple fix in the document above?

I have a SSD MBA that should arrive any day now. I'm anxious to try it out.

The "fix" has been tried by multiple people including myself. Reinstalling Leopard does nothing. The capacity shown during the Disk Utility reformat is 55.9GB (60,011,642,880 bytes). Of course it's nice to remove the 3.4 GB of printer drivers... but it doesn't change the capacity of the drive.
 
The "fix" has been tried by multiple people including myself. Reinstalling Leopard does nothing. The capacity shown during the Disk Utility reformat is 55.9GB (60,011,642,880 bytes). Of course it's nice to remove the 3.4 GB of printer drivers... but it doesn't change the capacity of the drive.
Yep, he's correct. The first thing I did when I unboxed my MBA was to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X clean, which saved me about 7 GB of disk space. The SSD formatted drive capacity did not change.
 
Nothing new...

I'll call Apple again. The SSD Air has been out a month now. Maybe tech support has more information.
 
I can't believe this issue isn't *exploding*. If people will sue over iMac 20" screens only having a zillion colors instead of a brazillion, I'm sure a missing 5gigs on an already VERY tight space constraint AND misleading advertising should be causing an absolute frenzy.

It seems Apple is just getting a pass on this one.
 
IMO, the difference between is that Apple made specific claims about the 20" iMac screens that the hardware obviously wasn't capable of performing.

With the MBA, they make no specific claims about formatted capacity. All I've seen them say is "Actual formatted capacity less".
 
It's definitely a different drive. My drive is listed as a MCCOE64GEMPP with a capacity of 55.9 GB and Anand's is a SAMSUNG PZA064 SSD with a capacity of 59.63 GB.



I'll call Apple tomorrow. I don't want to whine here, but this is BS. Every gig counts when you're talking about an SSD drive. I paid for a 64GB drive and Apple sold me a 60GB drive.

...never mind. I'm lazy today.
 
IMO, the difference between is that Apple made specific claims about the 20" iMac screens that the hardware obviously wasn't capable of performing.

With the MBA, they make no specific claims about formatted capacity. All I've seen them say is "Actual formatted capacity less".

The issue here isn't formatted capacity. The unformatted capacity is 60 GB not 64 GB. If some news site would just point out this issue I'm sure it would explode. The fact that the CPU doesn't run at more than 1.2 GHz for more than seconds without disabling the power throttling is also of the same magnitude.
 
I've been told by Apple multiple times that this is "normal". I'm not sure what else to do.
 
I just received my MBA (1.8/ SSD) yesterday and saw this thread today while researching where my "missing space" is.

This thread deserves a bump.
 
Same as me...

I've had the same issue; referb mac book air and only getting 55.9GB.

Spoke to the support department and they referred me to:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2734?viewlocale=en_US

Manage to get escalated and felt that something could have been done if it wasn't a referb but as it was managed to get £100 credit put back on to my account - better than a poke in the eye and no hassle really...
 
We now understand why this is.

SSD's not only take the hit in that capacity is advertised in base 10 but formats in binary base 2, but they also hold a percentage (generally around 5-10%) of the SSD cells in reserve to help with cells that go bad, wear leveling, random writes, etc.

All SSD's do this and you have the capacity but it isn't available to you.
 
We now understand why this is.

SSD's not only take the hit in that capacity is advertised in base 10 but formats in binary base 2, but they also hold a percentage (generally around 5-10%) of the SSD cells in reserve to help with cells that go bad, wear leveling, random writes, etc.

All SSD's do this and you have the capacity but it isn't available to you.

Bingo. My 256GB ssd is only 234GB formatted. its technically missing 2GB from actual value. If you add up the binary, it comes out to a "254GB" ssd.
 
Wow, this thread is still active?

Good post akm3, BUT that still doesn't explain why Anand's drive showed a 60GB capacity.

The plot thickens. In the anandtech review his Samsung disk not purchased from Apple has 59.63 GB Capacity and is formatted to 59.31 GB. What do you see in your system profile?

Check screenshot at the bottom of the page

Not that I care any more... I've moved on from the Air, but still it's strange.
 
Good post akm3, BUT that still doesn't explain why Anand's drive showed a 60GB capacity.



Not that I care any more... I've moved on from the Air, but still it's strange.

Likely he had a slightly different firmware on his Samsung drive and they tweaked it slightly before going mass market.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.