Hard Drive Space

ablack6596

ablack6596

Registered
Look at this picture under my hard drives why does it say capacity 38.16 and then available 6.50. What is the difference between capacity and available? If capacity is the size of my HD with nothing on it why does it say 38.16 when both HD's are 40gb HD's?
Thanks:)
 

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I don't know all the details, but roughly 2MB of any hard drive is unusable because it is taken up by the firmware (IIRC).
 
Sometimes hard disks are partitioned with unused space. Next time you re=partition take a close look to see if all space, or at least 99% of the disk is being formatted.
 
hard drives capacity is always smaller then advertised size cus of the formattings. formatting takes up a lot of space. bigger hard drive you loose more. i have a 13.6gb drive and formatted is about 12.7gb or so. right around 13gb. i also have a 40gb western digital and when i format it, it is around 38gb or little less. same for windows and mac format.

now what drive makers need to do is same as monitor. you can't say just 19" monitor. you must include viewable size as well. so 19" yet 18" viewable. hard drives need to be the same. so instead of just 40gb they need to say 40gb unformatted yet 38gb formatted, or whatever.
 
If u've got a harddrive wit 40 GB of space, this just means that u've got 40.000.000.000 bytes of free space on it after formatting.
But this ain't "real" 40 GB, because a gigabyte is 1024 mb and a mb is 1024 kb and so on.
The finder calculates ur harddisk size correctly, thats why it seems like u lost a little bit of space.

example:

40.000.000.000/1024/1024/1024 = 37,25

-> a 40 GB HD has just 37,25 GB free space available when u calculate the size correctly.

:)
 
Originally posted by Dradts
If u've got a harddrive wit 40 GB of space, this just means that u've got 40.000.000.000 bytes of free space on it after formatting.
But this ain't "real" 40 GB, because a gigabyte is 1024 mb and a mb is 1024 kb and so on.
The finder calculates ur harddisk size correctly, thats why it seems like u lost a little bit of space.

example:

40.000.000.000/1024/1024/1024 = 37,25

-> a 40 GB HD has just 37,25 GB free space available when u calculate the size correctly.

:)
Click to expand...

This calculation is not right! 40GB means 40*1024*1024*1024 = 43 000 000 000 bytes!

When you format the drive some space is allocated for drive directories/databases and drivers. And a 40GB harddrive is not exactly 40GB anyway. It's just a rounded value instead of saying like 39.1 GB.
 
If u buy a harddrive in a store, and u buy 40 GB, ull only get the said 38 GB because they will calculate the hd size as if 1 GB wuz only 1000 MB and so on...

So my calculation is not wrong ;)
 
BTW, capacity means the total size of your hard drive, and available means how much of that space is not already taken up with files and such.

-Rob
 
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