Just out of curiosity how come my 20Gb unit sez I only have 18.5 GB usable space?
I assume the operating system takes up some space, but as much as a full blown windows install?
Is it maybe how the partitions are set up?
Is it really only an 18.5 GB drive, rounded up to 20GB?
Just wondering if theres a way to reclaim any of that 1.5GB.

Zachary Volpicelli
Lost in Boston
Shiny New 20 (18.5) GB Mark IIa

Okay, this one's been asked enough times that I need a FAQ entry on it.

Before I do, I want to get some exact numbers. Who can tell me the exact size taken up by each of the player's non-music partitions?

To answer your question more generally, there are two reasons:

1) Manufacturers lie about their drive sizes, pretending that a gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes. Actually, a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes (or something like that, someone correct me if I'm wrong).

2) Some of the disk space is taken up by the player software and its temporary scratch partition (which it uses to store things like EQ settings and the playlist running order).

There's another reason free space is lower than expected: all filesystems use some space for 'bookkeeping'. In most Unix/Linux filesystems main consumer of space are 'inodes' ('index nodes', roughly equivalent to 'file headers' on DEC RSX-11 or VAX/VMS), the structures that store file attributes and physical location (not much more than filename is stored in directory entry).

Ah, thanks. I'll have to remember to put that in the FAQ when I write it.