How much HD space do you lose after formatting?

o-mac

Question. when you format a hard drive you normally lose some disk space, typically, 1 or 2 GB depending on the size. But have you ever heard of losing almost 20GB of disk space on a 200GB drive? Well, apparantly that's what someone from Apple's tech hotline told a customer...



Comments??

g-news

a 123GB disk formats to 115GB of space.

therefore 200gb to 180GB sounds reasonable.

nano

I think it all has to do with the 1000 to 1024 conversion. I don't know too much about it but thats why a DVD-r hold 4.4 instead of the 4.7 as advertised. Someone correct me if im wrong, im not totally sure.

staphbaby

Drive manufacturers measure Gigabytes as 1,000,000,000 bytes.



Real people and OSs measure Gigabytes as 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024^3)



The former is therefore about 93% of the latter.



So the unformatted, real, capacity of a 200GB drive should be around 186GB; the formatted capacity would be slightly less.



You'll find that in the real-world manufacturers usually ship the drives with slightly more than the advertised space on them, so it will end up being a bit larger than the above would suggest. So, for example, Apple shipped me a 60GB drive which actually holds 61,492,838,400 Bytes (57.26GB).

splinemodel

Quote:

Originally posted by staphbaby

Drive manufacturers measure Gigabytes as 1,000,000,000 bytes.



Real people and OSs measure Gigabytes as 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024^3)

Bingo

staphbaby

Quote:

Originally posted by Splinemodel

Bingo

Do I get a prize?