mystery of the missing 30 Gigs...
 

Can anyone tell me why my 500 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 scratch drive with nothing on it reads as only 465.8 GB in my Macbook Pro's disk utility information? It's in an icy dock enclosure and connected to my mac by an esata express card if that matters.

never mind, aparently this is normal for 500gb drives. anyone now why? How can they advertise them as 500GB when they're 35GB short?!!!! Ridiculous says I!

a 500gb hard drive can store 500,000 bits of information. a gb is actually 1,024,000. its a marketing strategy

This is an old marketing trick of the drive manufacturers. They're advertising and selling their drives by defining 1 GB as 1 billion bytes. However, for a computer 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024 x 1024 x 1024).

Divide 500,000,000,000 by 1024 three times and you'll end up with 465.

As I said, old marketing trick. Or call it a a question of definitions.
Best,
Dino

dino is correct, I left out a few zeros.

LOL! I also had to think twice about how many zeros.... it's crazy if you think about the amount of data we keep wasting...
Dino

Aaaahhh..... yes that makes perfect sense. Corporate Swine! I'm going to tie this HD to a brick and throw it through they're window!

yes because 0 gigabyte is better than 470 :)
every hdd has that, you'll just need to take that into account...