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Where's my 6GB ?

P

PreetinderBajwa

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 30, 2009
130
0
HK
Hi !

SL was expected to provide a 6GB benefit ! My starting and ending disk stats are as under : (320GB HDD, 17"UMBP)

Total Capacity..... Available Capacity
297.77 .................. 234.09....... Before SL
319.73 .................. 256.64....... After SL

I ran compressor on my Parallels desktop and regained 1GB(ish) which I would have got anyway.

I got duped !! by SL !!
 
Snow Leopard is only slightly smaller when you install the same items. I dont know where Apple pulled 6gbs from, its completely false.
 
stainlessliquid said:
Snow Leopard is only slightly smaller when you install the same items. I dont know where Apple pulled 6gbs from, its completely false.
Click to expand...

Maybe you should re-read some of the reviews on the subject. A default SL install is much smaller than a default L install.

This is due to new file compression technology that SL uses as well as the removal of thousands and thousands of unneeded files.
 
jmpage2 said:
Maybe you should re-read some of the reviews on the subject. A default SL install is much smaller than a default L install.

This is due to new file compression technology that SL uses as well as the removal of thousands and thousands of unneeded files.
Click to expand...

There are definite memory savings with a SL install, as Apple have actually extracted all the PPC code from the OS, hence why the OS will now no longer run on an PPC machine. Apple have also used very complicated file compression techniques (theres a great ars technica article detailing it) - if you look at a SL HDD from a pre-SL machine it will actually show up as the files being 0GB because of this compression.

The main reason I suspect from why it appears you have not really gained any space back might be from the fact that SL does indeed measure HDD capacity using different gauges than Leopard did.
 
Richard1028 said:
I didn't even bother to see what I gained. With Apple's "new math" I couldn't figure it out. :D I'd say it was negligible as I never install the extra printers or languages.
Click to expand...

but you did have all those PPC components of those applications in leopard. Which you dont have in SL, because SL doesn't support PPC anymore. Those are big savings.

As for apple's new invention of disk space counting. Nice laugh, with its 5% marketshare, what does apple want to do? Helping users? More like confusing users.
 
PreetinderBajwa said:
Hi !

SL was expected to provide a 6GB benefit ! My starting and ending disk stats are as under : (320GB HDD, 17"UMBP)

Total Capacity..... Available Capacity
297.77 .................. 234.09....... Before SL
319.73 .................. 256.64....... After SL

I ran compressor on my Parallels desktop and regained 1GB(ish) which I would have got anyway.

I got duped !! by SL !!
Click to expand...

Actually I make it that you gained about 4.9GB (using the old base 2 method):

256.64 * (297.77/319.73) = 239.01 GB free

That's not too shabby!
If you do a default Leopard install it will be bigger >11GB, I did a clean SL install on an external just for fun (I got the family pack and had only used 2 installs) and it was 5.8GB (5.4GB in base 2). So I think their 6GB saving is real enough. You may already have removed some of the extras from Leopard which may explain why you 'only' got 4.9GB.
 
clevin said:
but you did have all those PPC components of those applications in leopard. Which you dont have in SL, because SL doesn't support PPC anymore. Those are big savings.

As for apple's new invention of disk space counting. Nice laugh, with its 5% marketshare, what does apple want to do? Helping users? More like confusing users.
Click to expand...

Apple has hit 10% market share and continues to grow;

http://www.tuaw.com/2009/02/02/apple-market-share-continues-to-climb-windows-drops/

I don't really know why Apple changed to base 10 counting for disk space, probably because they've had to respond to lawsuits claiming that their 320GB hard disk offers on Macbooks offered only "280GB" that was usable.
 
clevin said:
but you did have all those PPC components of those applications in leopard. Which you dont have in SL, because SL doesn't support PPC anymore. Those are big savings.
Click to expand...

Actually I believe the removal of the PPC components is pretty much negligible. You can do something similar with tools like Monolingual and you get back MB, not GB. Of course mileage may vary.
In fact I think the biggest saving is the fact that the new executables (and more importantly their larger resource files) are compressed. This saves space and improves disk I/O. I've seen significant performance increases since upgrading, up to 80% faster startup times for some programs.

clevin said:
As for apple's new invention of disk space counting. Nice laugh, with its 5% marketshare, what does apple want to do? Helping users? More like confusing users.
Click to expand...

Again, I like this and think the disk manufacturers will too. I expect Microsoft will be pressured to adopt the same method. It doesn't matter how many times you tell people that their new 500GB disk will only 'look' as if it's 465GB because you have to divide by 1024 cubed, you see the same question time after time on blogs and boards..."where did my disk space go?"
Not many of us think in binary and I feel that computers will adapt to us and not vice versa.

It does remind me of my favourite geeky joke though:

There are only 10 types of people in the world.
Those that understand binary and those that don't!
 
mgclayton said:
Again, I like this and think the disk manufacturers will too. I expect Microsoft will be pressured to adopt the same method. It doesn't matter how many times you tell people that their new 500GB disk will only 'look' as if it's 465GB because you have to divide by 1024 cubed, you see the same question time after time on blogs and boards..."where did my disk space go?"
Click to expand...

Um. Disk manufacturers are the *source* of this confusion.

From the beginning of computers, a kilobyte was defined as 1024 bytes (2^10). Megabytes, gigabytes, etc were also defined as 1024 <next smaller step>. Then hard disk manufacturers noticed (some time around the 200MB HDD mark) that they could sell a drive that held 200MB for a noticeable amount more than the identical drive that only held 190MB, so they switched from the prior base-2 measurement to using base-10. After all, the difference in size according to the box vs. size reported by the computer was virtually unnoticeable. Thus was born the 'formatted size vs. unformatted size' myth. After a law suit, they were forced to add a disclaimer to their products that they measured their sizes in base-10.

Unfortunately, as drive sizes increased into the GB and then TB, the difference has become more and more noticeable.

With drive sizes measured in KB, it was a 2.4% difference.
With drive sizes measured in MB, it was a 4.7% difference. (47KB/MB)
With drive sizes measured in GB, it became a 6.9% difference. (69MB/GB)
With drive sizes measured in TB, it has become nearly a 9.1% difference. (91GB/TB)

Don't blame Apple for this switch, put the blame squarely where it belongs. (On the hard disk manufacturers.)
 
tbrinkma said:
Um. Disk manufacturers are the *source* of this confusion.

From the beginning of computers, a kilobyte was defined as 1024 bytes (2^10). Megabytes, gigabytes, etc were also defined as 1024 <next smaller step>. Then hard disk manufacturers noticed (some time around the 200MB HDD mark) that they could sell a drive that held 200MB for a noticeable amount more than the identical drive that only held 190MB, so they switched from the prior base-2 measurement to using base-10. After all, the difference in size according to the box vs. size reported by the computer was virtually unnoticeable. Thus was born the 'formatted size vs. unformatted size' myth. After a law suit, they were forced to add a disclaimer to their products that they measured their sizes in base-10.

Unfortunately, as drive sizes increased into the GB and then TB, the difference has become more and more noticeable.

With drive sizes measured in KB, it was a 2.4% difference.
With drive sizes measured in MB, it was a 4.7% difference. (47KB/MB)
With drive sizes measured in GB, it became a 6.9% difference. (69MB/GB)
With drive sizes measured in TB, it has become nearly a 9.1% difference. (91GB/TB)

Don't blame Apple for this switch, put the blame squarely where it belongs. (On the hard disk manufacturers.)
Click to expand...

Actually, I blame the geeks who started all of this nonsense by using non-standard terminology. Every other counting system uses kilo to represent 1000, not 1024. The geeks who started all of this decided that didn't make sense to them, and instead of either adopting new terminology or using the standard units, they simply made the "standard" units fit their new counting system, thus screwing everything up for the next 30+ years. To complicate that, primarily for marketing reasons, hard drive and RAM manufacturers decided to use standard units (thus inflating the size of the drive without actually misrepresenting it), but no one else decided to make the switch until recently.

jW
 
clevin said:
As for apple's new invention of disk space counting. Nice laugh, with its 5% marketshare, what does apple want to do? Helping users? More like confusing users.
Click to expand...
I don't know whether it's right but I bet they're going to save a fortune on tech support calls:

"Hey! I just hooked up a new 320gb drive and my mac says I only have 297gb. You bastards Apple! Where's my other freaking 30gb?!?!" :D
 
Where did you get your numbers from? It looks like however the size is being calculated, the HFS+ compression that was applied to many of the system files isn't being taken into account.
 
stainlessliquid said:
Snow Leopard is only slightly smaller when you install the same items. I dont know where Apple pulled 6gbs from, its completely false.
Click to expand...

Zero evidence to support that.

Pre SL: 47484043264 bytes.

Post SL: 34822000000 bytes.

Base 10 difference: about 12.7 gigabytes.

Base 2 difference: about 11.8 gigabytes.

mt
 
clevin said:
but you did have all those PPC components of those applications in leopard. Which you dont have in SL, because SL doesn't support PPC anymore. Those are big savings.

As for apple's new invention of disk space counting. Nice laugh, with its 5% marketshare, what does apple want to do? Helping users? More like confusing users.
Click to expand...

The removal of PPC code gives you absolutely no savings, the 64-bit binaries take their space nicely.
 
PurrBall said:
The removal of PPC code gives you absolutely no savings, the 64-bit binaries take their space nicely.
Click to expand...

You guys are still missing it.

32 bit version of binary in base 2 on Leopard = 100KB on disk.

64 bit version of same binary file in base 2 on Snow Leopard = SMALLER BECAUSE OF NEW FILE COMPRESSION TECHNOLOGY.

Geez. :rolleyes:
 
got mine

had only 5 GB free when I started--had to strip out a bunch of stuff just to make SL fit! ended up with 12 after install so I got the maximum 7. Very happy with the results. I have a 3 1/2 year old Macbook with a 60GB hard drive so it was a real benefit for me.
 
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