TOPIC
Both my Power Macintosh 6500/275 Creative Studio and Power Macintosh 6500/300 computers ship with a 4 GB (4 Gig) hard drive. After formatting my hard drives with Drive Setup or a third-party formatting utility, I now see 3.7 GB of free space available on the drive in the Finder instead of the full 4 GB. Where is the remaining 300 MB of free space? Am I missing hard drive space?
DISCUSSION No, the hard disk space is not missing. It is also important to point out that what you describe is not specific to the Power Macintosh 6500 computers. This occurs with any Macintosh and Power Macintosh computer running under System 7.5.x, Mac OS 7.6.x, and Mac OS 8.0. At present, the hard disk drive industry measures disk capacity as 1MB = 1,000,000 bytes (1000 * 1000) . For example, this is defined in Quantum, Seagate, and Western Digital's product specifications and documentation (this is becoming an industy standard). For more information, visit these companies' respective web sites. The Macintosh Finder measures disk drive capacity as 1MB = 1,048,576 bytes (1024 * 1024). With regard to the above example, the 4 GB hard disk included in the Power Macintosh 6500/275 Creative Studio and Power Macintosh 6500/300 computers has a total of 4000776192 bytes of storage capacity. By industry definition this is a 4 GB hard disk. The Mac OS Finder shows this space as follows if you divide the total bytes by 1,048,576 bytes: 4000776192 bytes = 3815.4375 MB = 3.7 GB The disk drive industry measures drive capacity as follows if you divide the total bytes by 1,000,000 bytes: 4000776192 bytes = 4000.776192 MB = 4.0 GB For more information on this issue, please see the following Tech Info Library article: Article 11148: " Hard Drives: Partition Size and Missing Space Explained " |
| Document Information | |
| Product Area: | Computers |
| Category: | General Topics |
| Sub Category: | General Topics |
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