20Gig hard drive

[matt_r_baker]

I have bought a '20Gig' MP3 player but i would like to know why the capacity (according to my PC) is only 18.6 gb and is there a way of regaining the lost 1.4 gb??????

[bluejonjo]

Its not lost, its a common manufacturer speil to round up the size. My mac came with a 80gb drive, in reality its 76.4 and is to do with the way bits and bytes are arranged in sectors of 8.

[Ethel]

And some of that is needed for the Operations System, the brains of the player.

[wideboy]

The bits and bytes relate to the fact that 1024 is used by computers but some (?) manufacturers prefer to use 1000 (the difference soon builds up once you are into GB).

[Bob A Job]

you get the same problem with all digital media.

Buy a DVD-R thats 4.7gb and only get 4.36gb to use!

[rojash]

Wide boy is correct. Ethel, I don't know of any MP3 player that stores its operating system on the hard drive

[WoWo]

It doesn't necessarily store the OS on the hard drvie but it does often have extra system information such as playlists etc.

However as suggested it's more to do with the fact manufacturers round up the figures.

[birdie1971]

You never get the exact size that the manufacturer claims. Although your hard drive is theoretically 20Gb, once it's been formated with a filing system (such as NTFS, FAT, FAT32, etc.), the filing system itself takes up quite a bit of space cos it puts invisible stuff like sectors, clusters and the File Allocation Table on the disk.