New imac plz help

Question

today i got my new imac delivered... 320GB.. how come i had 280GB only is that normal? ps: i had tiger installed and installed leopard from the disk.. is there any utility to use to check what's using the hard drive...
ps: i am quite familiar with tiger (user for 3 years)

Answer 1

Hi Clive Barbara!
There have been other threads, but just last night I was looking at the Samsung (hard drive manufacturer) website and copied their answer from a FAQ. You might find it's more than you wanted to know, but:
"The Capacity of the Drive Is About 8% Lower than What It Should Be
This is because of the dual meaning of the word "gigabyte," depending on whether it's calculated in binary (base-2) or decimal (base-10) mathematics. A gigabyte means 109 (1,000,000,000) bytes. A gigabyte also means 230 (1,073,741,824) bytes.
An 80-gigabyte hard drive has a capacity of 80 billion bytes.  Since we think in terms of base-10, when we say "gigabyte" we mean the decimal gigabyte. A computer's architecture is designed on powers of two, so when a computer says "gigabyte," it means the binary gigabyte.
Therefore, an operating system may display the capacity of an 80-gigabyte hard drive as 74.5 gigabytes. There will appear to be 7.4 percent fewer gigabytes, but each is also 7.4 percent larger.
In much the same way that a tree is the same size whether its height is said to be 25 feet or 8.2 meters, 80 decimal gigabytes and 74.5 binary gigabytes both refer to exactly the same capacity, 80,000,000,000 bytes."
Above quoted from the Samsung website.