why

[ERICBRIAN2002]

I buy a 80gb hd the box says 80gigs but its really 74?

[MDLarson]

I believe every hard drive has an unformatted size, and a formatted size. Much like a 2 MB floppy is really 1.4 MB, your 80 GB drive is probably 74 GB formatted.

[Koelling]

And it changes a little bit depending on how you format. The thing that makes me mad is in OS 9 when I burn a CD in Toast, I get 700 mb or 699.something but when I do the OS X burn I can only get 696. I can't find anywhere to change this either.

[symphonix]

Some filesystems are worse than others. Unix has a standard wastage of 10%, but this is adjustable. Allowing more than 10% for FS tasks makes the defragmenting routines built into Unix run faster, but means you lose a little disk space.
Mac OS X's HPFS is marginally less than 10% used for filesystem tasks, this seems to run the fastest on Mac hardware, but you should allow for this when you buy a drive according to size, around 8-9% will be lost to the file-system.

[ERICBRIAN2002]

but dam 6 gigs

[adambyte]

So an iPod is more like 900 songs in your pocket?

[MDLarson]

Apple System Profiler:


How should I interpret this screenshot then?

[edX]

also eric, keep in mind it will be a 75gb hd after you are done formatting

this is from one of my posts from when you were asking about buying this drive. I forwarned you this was what was going to happen and now you act all surprised and cheated.

I realize i am nowhere near as smart as anybody else on this site. I don't have a degree in CS. I only use my mac.

I guess the reason this bothers me is that you also asked my opinion about the umax scanner you bought and i told you it only worked in classic. a short while later you were whining about it not having osx support. do you have neurological damage or do you just think i make stuff up?

i'm sorry everybody if you feel i am harsh, but it really gets on my nerves when we all offer our help and people only hear what they want to hear.