Just bought one.

It is telling me thatit's capacity is 7.4 gb. Shouldn't it be 8?

With a lot of USB devices it says that the capacity is less than what the capacity should be

A portion of the space on a disk is taken up by the formatting information that marks sector headings, boundary definitions, timing information and other ‘overhead’.

For this reason, a disk's storage total depends on if you are looking at the formatted (the usable capacity of a disk drive) or unformatted capacity. It is normal for a disk to be sold quoting the unformatted capacity, one reason being that there are many different disk formats.

The larger the disk capacity the more you 'loose'.
Last edited by dlloyd : 26-10-2006 at 23:26

Thanks for the reply.

So I shouldn't send it back and complain then

Nope - even my mini iPod does not show the full 6gb of space (I think they use the space to put the iPods features on (games etc)).

Yep, same here. My 1GB (1024mb) Shuffle shows as 997MB

My 250GB hard drives actual cappacity is 228GB!

It happens with ALL hard disks.

its the same with all hard drives.................my 120gb hard drive has 111gb actual formatted space....something to do with there being 1024 bits per 1 kb