Ipod 4th Gen real hard drive size

[fragarch]

Hi !

It looks like my 4th gen iPod 20 gb is only able to get 18,5 gb of music. is it the normal size or is there a way to max that size to
at least 19 gb ?

I have nothing except music on it

thanks for helping

[stinkiedmb]

it has to do with how GB are calculated.

20GB is the following:

171798691840 bits
21474836480 bytes
20971520 kilobytes (abbreviated as KB or Kb*)
20480 megabytes (abbreviated as M or MB)
20 gigabytes (abbreviated as G or GB)
0.019531 terabytes
0.0000191 petabytes
0.00000002 exabytes



but what you have is 20,000,000,000 bytes:

160000000000 bits
20000000000 bytes
19531250.000 kilobytes (abbreviated as KB or Kb*)
19073.4863 megabytes (abbreviated as M or MB)
18.62645 gigabytes (abbreviated as G or GB)
0.018190 terabytes
0.0000178 petabytes
0.00000002 exabytes


it is entirely normal. all hard drives, including the ipod's, are calculated based on bytes, not based on GB, so it's sort of deceiving to the consumer. i believe that only Western Digital has begun to give honest capcities on their hard drives.

and don't forget to read the ipodlounge FAQ section before posting your questions. the forum search option is also a valuable resource. no one wants to have the same question posted 1,000 times in our forum. that's simply wasteful.

welcome to the lounge!

[stinkiedmb]

most people will tell you that it is because of the software that is installed on the ipod that the capacity is not 20GB, but that is not entirely true.

the ipod software consumes mere megabytes of storage. the real lacking in the hard drive capacity is due to the way it is calculated, as i have explained above.

[fragarch]

well, apple 'lies' by advertising 20gb and 40gb iPods if that is the cause...

Sorry if it was posted before, I did use the search tool but apparently bad

[YHELOTHUR]

Originally posted by fragarch
well, apple 'lies' by advertising 20gb and 40gb iPods if that is the cause...

No more than any other company selling HDD's 'lies'. I believe Hitachi makes the hard drives that Apple uses (I may be wrong about that), so you should take it up with them, if anyone. (Check the actual size of your hard drive in your computer, I'll bet it's not a nice even number like 40/60/80/200gb, even though it's advertised to be)

[Jesse Hollington]

Essentially correct... To any hardware manufacturer, 1Gb equals 1,000,000,000 bytes. Apple's playing by the same rules here as the rest of the industry, and everybody's been doing it for years. In fact, I seem to recall a lawsuit about two years ago where some computer owners in California attempted to sue some of the computer manufacturers over false advertising. I don't think it ever actually went anywhere...

Further, even if Apple was really concerned about the software definition of a Gigabyte, they'd still be limited by what the hard drive manufacturers can provide, and selling them as "18.5Gb" and "37.5Gb" iPods just doesn't make sense from a marketing point of view.

In fact, there has actually been an IEC standard in place since the late nineties that technically defines a "kilobyte" as 1,000 bytes, and uses the term "kibibyte" to refer to 1,024 bytes (ditto for Megabyte/Mebibyte, and Gigabyte/Gibibyte). So technically, the hard drive manufacturers are using the correct terminology... It's the software developers that aren't...

This terminology has never really caught on, however.