[Trounce]

Well, I just got my 10gb Ipod and when I go into the "About" menu, it says "Capacity" is 9.2G and I have 6.8G "Available". What does that mean? I checked in windows explorer for non-mp3s downloaded to the hard drive, but there is nothing. What does this mean?

Thanks.

 

[Maxvla]

do you have any songs loaded?

9.2 is the formatted size. that is correct.

need a little more info.

 

[Taphil]

The old ipods had problems displaying the correct value. Try doing a restore to see if that fixes the problem. If it doesn't, then don't worry about it. It shouldn't affect anything.

 

[Trounce]

Well, yes, I have used up all the space.
That is what irks me. I have like 60megs left. But it stayed at 6.8G when the HD was empty. I just don't understand it.

Firmware is 1.2.6

 

[Ruahrc]

What version of iPod do you have? Windows or Mac?

I have the windows 10GB "old" one, and use EphPod. It will not update the free space correctly either. I formatted it once and loaded up my songs again and it displayed the correct amount, but after I added some songs later it didn't update the free space. I just came to ignore it since I hardly ever look at the "About" screen anyhow.

About the 9.2GB when it's empty- that's a nonconsistent use of the word "gigabyte". Stricly speaking, a gigabyte is 1 billion bytes. The 10 gigabyte iPod drive has 10,000,000,000 bytes of storage capacity, but it is not ten "computer gigabytes" Computer storage only comes in powers of 2, so a "computer gigabyte" is the first power of 2 that breaks a billion bytes, which is 2^30 or 1,073,418,240 bytes. So ten "computer gigabytes" is ten times this amount or 10,734,182,400 bytes, not an even 10 billion. This number is a little higher than the 10,000,000,000 bytes that your iPod drive has, thus the discrepancy.

If you actually do the math and divide your 10,000,000,000 bytes by 1,073,418,240 you get 9.32GB (computer gigabytes), which is what windows will report the actual drive capacity as. I'm assuming the software on the iPod or some other form of stored data will cut down the avaliable space to the 9.2GB you see reported on the iPod.

It's just a little marketing trick because 10GB sounds like more capacity than 9.31GB.

Ruahrc

 

[aos]

Yep, 9.2G is normal for 10G iPod and Ruahrc's explanation is right-on. The extra space is likely taken by the FAT
(file access table), i.e. the filesystem. You also have some space taken by control files (database, playlists, contact cards, alarms etc.) but I don't think that counts into the "missing" 112MB, just the filesystem.

Or are you saying that you emptied the iPod and it claims you have no space left? It is possible you have orphan files, i.e. files not refered by database or playlists, but still present on iPod. Some software like ephPod is capable of finding these orphans and deleting them during sync. Another option is to enable iPod to be used as a Firewire drive, and simply go to it in the windows explorer and see what's left on it. Of course if you add files through windows explorer, you won't be able to see them in iPod interface, and if you delete them from explorer then iPod will naturally fail to play them though it will still show them as present - because it uses iTunes database in its own format and that's what the sync software is all about.