MiniMate capacity...

[wyzard]

Good evening.

Why does the capacity on my 160GB minimate I got about a week ago, show available 149GB (roughly)... I've put on some thing and use about 26GB of space and am showing 123 available now.

What happened to the other 11GB??

BTW, it was formatted out of the box in Mac OS Extended, and I didn't do anything except plug it in....

Thanks.

[Susurrus]

Well, this actually has to do with the awesome ability of advertisers to do whatever they want.

When companies advertise the capacity of their drives, they consider each prefix to a byte to be a multiple of it by 1000. A kilobyte is 1000 bytes, a megabyte is 1000 kilobytes, etc. In other words, base 10, the traditional base for math (and the average person).

Computers use everything in base 2, therefore they think of things is multiples of 1024(2^10). Therefore 1 gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes. The computer uses this value to calculate how many gigabyes your computer has using the base 2 system.

In summary: Your computer still has 160GB of hard drive space. (160,000,000,000 real-bytes / 1073741824 real-bytes-per-base2-gigabye = 149.0116119384765625 base2-gigabytes.

Hope that helps. It's so long and math intensive because I, myself, was curious also. (I wanted to make sure the math was right and I wasn't blowing smoke)