How many GBs are free in a 17" CD2 160HD when you buy it?

Question

A 160Hd comes formatted and with the OS X installed... I'd like to know how many GBs are free to put your things there. I guess it's maybe something like 120GB?
Thank you!

Answer 1

Cletus,
Can someone explain where the other GB's go? My 15 inch came the same way... however, even doing System Profile, does not indicate it is a 160 GB hard drive. It reports as indicated a 149.5 etc.
In brief, when you see HD capacity advertised as 60GB, 80GB, 100GB etc, that's the marketing way where they take "decimal" road and base 1GB as being equal to 1,000,000,000 bytes. This is true for all HD manufacturers and computer manufacturers.
Once upon a time, computer professionals noticed that 1,024 bytes (binary) was very nearly equal to 1,000 (decimal) and started using the prefix "kilo" to mean 1,024. That worked well enough for a decade or two because everybody who talked kilobytes knew that the term implied 1,024 bytes. But, almost overnight a much more numerous "everybody" bought computers, and the trade computer professionals needed to talk to physicists and engineers and even to ordinary people, most of whom know that a kilometer is 1,000 meters and a kilogram is 1,000 grams.
Often when two or more people begin discussing storage capacity, some will refer to binary values and others will refer to decimal values without making distinction between the two. This has caused much confusion in the past (and still does). In an effort to dispatch this confusion, all major disc drive manufacturers use decimal values when discussing storage capacity.
Some simple arithmetic will convert the advertised (decimal) capacity to the actual (binary) capacity:
1KB = 1,024 bytes
1MB = 1,024 x 1,024 bytes = 1,048,576 bytes
1GB = 1,024 x 1,024 x 1,024 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes
Therefore, in your specific case:
160GB (decimal) = 160 ÷ 1.073741824 = 149.01161193848 GB (binary or actual capacity)
Rounded off to two decimal points = 149.01 GB
I hope this clarifies it for you and explains the reasons for the discrepancy.
RD