SydLexia.com - The Forums :: View topic

Posted: Sep 03 2008 07:20 pm

I bought an 8GB iPod and I was kind of pissed off because when i hooked it up with 0 songs, 0 movie, 0 pics etc. it said it only has 7.41GB available.

I know it's not a crisis but 590MB's is still a good bit of space for more songs and the like.

Does anyone know if there is anything you can do to free up that 590MB's? or is this just how they come? I know you can't delete the couple games that come with it, but from what I know they take up very little space so that's not the issue.

Just kind of annoyed, I paid for 8 gigs, I expected to have 8 gigs of space available.

Posted: Sep 03 2008 07:23 pm

That's how everything is. Like a blank CD only has 660-odd mbs instead of 700. DVD-Rs have 4.3 gb instead of 4.7. My 320 gb hard drive is closer to 285 gb. It's how it goes.

By the way, I renamed the thread cause it bothered me.

Posted: Sep 03 2008 07:57 pm

and external drives. you should be used to it by now.

i have '500' gb but in reality i only have 465

Joined: Dec 06 2007 Location: Connecticut Posts: 11244

Different drives are measured differently because the MB measurement has been adjusted. However with regards to flash drives, 1MB = 1,024,000 bytes, but they are selling based on 1MB = 1,000,000 bytes.

8GB = 8,192,000,000 bytes = but what they really give is 8,000,000,000 bytes and your computer knows it. So your computer reports it as 97.5% of the 8GB.

To further complicate things, a portion of the storage space is allocated to the file system. Think of it as the card catalog used to find all the files you put on your device. Without it, it would be like walking into a library where all the books are just thrown into a pile and no one ever organized them.

As if that weren't enough, some of that memory is probably used to house the application that runs the iPod. You know... the software that makes the device work.

In the end, it adds up to ~500MB or so.

But consider yourself lucky, I installed Vista the other day and it took up 10GB of a hard drive. Oh and Mac people don't think OSX is so great. The DVD itself is over 4.7GB... Once expanded it is fucking huge too.

Docinsano's Channel 63 · Posted: Sep 03 2008 10:11 pm

I always thought that the loss of space was due to formatting. Maybe not.

Posted: Sep 04 2008 05:13 am

The most annoying thing is that engineers usually define 1KB as 1024B, while computer scientist often treat 1KB as 1000B in accordance with the SI definition of kilo. So in my computer engineering class kilo was 2¹⁰, while my computer networks class had everything in powers of ten. There's a unit called KiB (kibibyte) that tries to avoid this confusion, but nobody except Wikipedia uses that.

Posted: Sep 04 2008 08:12 am

Tyop wrote:

The most annoying thing is that engineers usually define 1KB as 1024B, while computer scientist often treat 1KB as 1000B in accordance with the SI definition of kilo. So in my computer engineering class kilo was 2¹⁰, while my computer networks class had everything in powers of ten. There's a unit called KiB (kibibyte) that tries to avoid this confusion, but nobody except Wikipedia uses that.

Wha? I took both engineering and comp sci classes, and never encountered a kilobyte to be anything aside from 1000 bites. Are you sure you aren't talking about megabytes? (Though I've honestly never heard of a megabyte being anything besides 1024KB, so this is news to me.

Joined: Dec 06 2007 Location: Connecticut Posts: 11244

Dr. Jeebus wrote:

Tyop wrote:

The most annoying thing is that engineers usually define 1KB as 1024B, while computer scientist often treat 1KB as 1000B in accordance with the SI definition of kilo. So in my computer engineering class kilo was 2¹⁰, while my computer networks class had everything in powers of ten. There's a unit called KiB (kibibyte) that tries to avoid this confusion, but nobody except Wikipedia uses that.

Wha? I took both engineering and comp sci classes, and never encountered a kilobyte to be anything aside from 1000 bites. Are you sure you aren't talking about megabytes? (Though I've honestly never heard of a megabyte being anything besides 1024KB, so this is news to me.

Tyop = Correct

Mebibyte!

Posted: Sep 04 2008 01:16 pm

Dr. Jeebus wrote:

Wha? I took both engineering and comp sci classes, and never encountered a kilobyte to be anything aside from 1000 bites. Are you sure you aren't talking about megabytes? (Though I've honestly never heard of a megabyte being anything besides 1024KB, so this is news to me.

That's even more confusing and inconsistent. It's also why the capacity of floppy disks was said to be 1.44MB (instead of 1.47MB or 1.41MiB). Luckily nobody defines KB and MB that way anymore, so it's either 1MB = 1000KB = 1000 * 1000 Byte or 1MB = 1024KB = 1024 * 1024 Byte.

And I've never really liked Gebibyte, Mebibyte and Kibibyte. Those sound more like Pokemons than units of information.

Joined: Dec 06 2007 Location: Connecticut Posts: 11244

Tyop wrote:

And I've never really liked Gebibyte, Mebibyte and Kibibyte. Those sound more like Pokemons than units of information.

That's what happens when the International Electrotechnical Commission allows M3GA MAN and his 12 year old friends to name official units.

Posted: Sep 04 2008 02:08 pm

GPFontaine wrote:

Tyop wrote:

And I've never really liked Gebibyte, Mebibyte and Kibibyte. Those sound more like Pokemons than units of information.

That's what happens when the International Electrotechnical Commission allows M3GA MAN and his 12 year old friends to name official units.

Posted: Sep 04 2008 04:22 pm

I was indeed backwards, and a KB is 1024 bytes and a megabyte is 1000 KB.