iPod storage capacity

September 20, 2004 / Filed under: Apple, Miscellaneous

One thing that has aggravated me since I got my iPod on Friday, is the storage capacity, and how it seems to "round down" the total available space.

First of all, right out of the box, my 20 GB iPod only had around 18.5 GB’s actually available. Now, this same thing used to happen, back in the day, with Iomega Zip disks. I remember a 100 MB Zip disk would only have about 93 MB available. Something about the software taking up space?

In any case, with any device that has a storage capacity, it seems that there is never as much space as advertised.

Currently, I have only 1500 songs on my iPod, which is taking up around 7 GB of space. My iPod is claiming I only have somewhere under 12 GB remaining. That, to me, seems like absolutely nothing. Considering the fact that there are MILLIONS of songs out there, and I want them all.

Should I have bought the 40 GB model??

On another note, the external hard drive I use to store all my iTunes (before I transfer songs to my iPod) is 120 GB. Now... THAT I can see lasting quite some time. Plus, they already have 250 GB external hard drives out, for under $250, which is much less than my 20 GB iPod. In a few years, I can see 500 GB to 1 TB external hard drives hitting the market.

Let’s face it. Storage is cheap.

Except with Apple.

Comments/Mentions

# Amanda at 9/20/2004 7:04 am cst

No kidding. I just bought a spanking new laptop less than a week ago, which claims to have a 60GB hard drive. Ha! That storage is actually split between 2 hard drives, one with the recovery info on it, and a mere 14GB leftover which leaves the other hard drive with a wimpy 40GB.(Where is the other 6GB, I have no idea) I totally should have gone for the 80GB. Thank god for external drives!

# Matthom at 9/22/2004 4:26 pm cst

It really pisses me off! My iPod is significantly less potent - without those 2 Gigs. Not to mention it seems like it "rounds down" the available storage.

I just realized that manufacturers or companies could actually LIE about the amount of storage available, just to get consumers to go out and but the bigger model - AFTER they purchased the smaller one.

# Duncan at 9/18/2008 10:30 am cst

The reason that you have less available storage space on your device than claimed is that you have to format a hard drive before you put data on to it. This is basically the "framework" that the drive needs to put the data into so it knows where it is and where to retreive it from. A bit like the gaps between tracks on a record, it indicates where the start of the music data is. All HDD have to do this.

# pointless56 at 2/11/2010 10:20 am cst

i think the available space on the ipod is the listed values. the computer measures in muliples of 8, so the internal computer measures 1024kb as 1 gig