Available Hard Disc Space

I have an iMac4 which I bought a year ago with 500 Gb of hard disc space. I had an iBook with 40 Gb of space and when I got my new machine I transferred all the info across straight away. The strange thing was that I then appeared to have used about 250 Gb of the space on my new HD. This has puzzled me for tha past year! How does 40 Gb expand on transfer to take up nearly 250 Gb of space??
I have just looked through some past posts and downloaded 'WhatSize' to see if that can shed any light on the problem. Unfortunately it hasn't! It is telling me that I have a capacity of 465 Gb, I've used 281 Gb and have 183 Gb available. There is nothing strange or startling on my Mac. I have MS Office 2001, some itunes and some photos. Nothing outrageous as we just use the Mac for normal, low level family stuff.
'What Size' show that that the HD is using the following space:
24.9 Gb Users
9.83 Gb Library
6.93 Gb Applications
2.82 Gb The Sims 2.localised
1.64 Gb System
1.96 Gb private
513 Mb usr
388 Mb Applications (Mac OS 9)
Those are the main ones followed by a list of others (about 15) none of which takes up more than 240 Mb. When I add up all of the above it makes about 50 Gb. Where's the other 230 Gb gone?!!!
I would be grateful if anyone could shed some light on this for me.

Hi Alun, 
Apple stopped selling iMac G5s in Jan 2006 so it seems odd that it's only a year old. I suspect that you have an Intel iMac. Could you check the processor in  > About this Mac.... Thanks.
465Gb is the correct figure for your hard disk. Data is stored in a binary fashion but hard disks are sold in decimal notation. The conversion calculation for Gigabytes is
(500 x 10003) / 10243 = 465.66Gb.
regards
mrtotes

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