Why is a 60G ipod have less than 60G??
Asked by
Evan (
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December 21st, 2006
Mine says that the base amount of free space is 55.68 gigs - is the operating software really this big, or am i being jacked of space that was marketed?
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6 Answers
The operating software is really that big. Plus any of the "space" on a hard drive is devoted to information about the hard drive itself, such as where the files are and so forth.
"formatting" takes up some space, but I think the bigger difference is that there are two slightly different definitions of gigabyte (GB). When you buy a hard disk drive (or iPod), the definition they use is 1 GB = 1 billion bytes. When the computer looks at the hard disk drive, the computer defines a GB as 2^30 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes.
So the hard disk drive appears smaller on the computer. It still contains 60 billion bytes, but that's actually only 55.879 gigabytes.
The two competing definitions of GB are annoying. Apple didn't invent them; it's a weirdly prevalent, yet confusing, computer industry thing.
Bob, thank you for posting exactly what I was going to post. The iPod software is very small, 30MB or so. 60GB, 120GB, etc it all depends on how you have the iPod formatted. No consumer operating system will give you all 60GB.
the iPod firmware is actually about 400 mb (the installation file is only 30 mb). The rest of the taken up space is used to store cache for running the iPod. Yes the iPod has a cache
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