Some say that it is only 25 gig after being formatted?

That's probably not a question of formatting, but of manufacturers lying about capacity, combined with the way the drive is used.

Remember back in the old days, when someone used to say "17 inch monitor" even though you could only see 15 inches of picture? Then they passed a law saying that's false advertising and they must publish the viewable area, not the picture tube size.

Well, I wish they would do the same with hard disks. When you buy a 30-gig hard drive, it's not really 30 gigs. It's thirty million bytes, and a million bytes is not a gigabyte. A gigabyte is 1024x1024 (1048576) bytes. So a 30-million-byte hard drive is actually only 28.6 gigabytes.

In the case of the Empeg, remember that much of the software resides on the hard disk, and it needs a little extra space for the scratch partition, playlist data, and database files. So that 28.6 gigabytes gets whittled away a little bit more (I'm not sure how much more).

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Tony Fabris