Is it normal to have only 7.37 GB total capacity on my new Clip+ 8gb version? My old Clip 8GB 2nd gen capacity is slightly larger, some hundred MB larger. Can someone clear this out?
@icsterm wrote:
Is it normal to have only 7.37 GB total capacity on my new Clip+ 8gb version? My old Clip 8GB 2nd gen capacity is slightly larger, some hundred MB larger. Can someone clear this out?
That has to be firmware. Keep in mind, this player will need more firmware, not only to support any old microsdhc card, but also to support the SlotRadio cards. It’s nothing to worry about.
Kind of strange, some heck of firmware occupying more than 300MB? anyway, because i mainly use flacs, that means almost one album less storage.
You’re never going to get 8 gigs worth of space out of an 8GB drive, flash-based or conventional. 8GB is ‘marketing-size’; the 7.37GB is ‘actual-size’.
@icsterm wrote:
Kind of strange, some heck of firmware occupying more than 300MB? anyway, because i mainly use flacs, that means almost one album less storage.
That’s why there’s a card slot…so you have more storage!
Thanks for clearing out 
Two issues.
1. The original 8GB space will have some firmware on it to run the player. That takes some space.
2. Second, There is a wierd little loophole that memory manufacturers are allowed to advertise, which allows us to have “less” true bytes than we think we should have.
A MB is really 1024 bytes. and a 1GB is really 1024 * 1024 = 1048576 bytes. So for a computer to report 8GB, the actual memory onboard must be 8388608 bytes
Memory manufacturers are allowed to define 8GB as 8000000 bytes. Given this information a computer would see 8000000 bytes as 7812.5 MB or 7.629 GB. And this is before ANY firmware is added.
And due to the math the larger the memory advertised, the bigger the discrepancie.
My 8GB Fuze has a 16GB card. 24GB total right??? NOT… 24000000 bytes is actually computed by my machine as 23437.5 MB or a whopping 22.88 GB.
So its mainly the difference in the way that computers calculate and label memory (binary) and the way humans calculate and label memory (base 10).
@p_opus wrote:
Two issues.
1. The original 8GB space will have some firmware on it to run the player. That takes some space.
2. Second, There is a wierd little loophole that memory manufacturers are allowed to advertise, which allows us to have “less” true bytes than we think we should have.
A MB is really 1024 bytes. and a 1GB is really 1024 * 1024 = 1048576 bytes. So for a computer to report 8GB, the actual memory onboard must be 8388608 bytes
Memory manufacturers are allowed to define 8GB as 8000000 bytes. Given this information a computer would see 8000000 bytes as 7812.5 MB or 7.629 GB. And this is before ANY firmware is added.
And due to the math the larger the memory advertised, the bigger the discrepancie.
My 8GB Fuze has a 16GB card. 24GB total right??? NOT… 24000000 bytes is actually computed by my machine as 23437.5 MB or a whopping 22.88 GB.
So its mainly the difference in the way that computers calculate and label memory (binary) and the way humans calculate and label memory (base 10).
Yes, and technically the binary labels (1024) are actually MiB and GiB and called Mebibytes and Gibibytes, which is why manufacturers are allowed to do this - because they are actually selling 8 gigabytes 
Also, my freshly formatted Clip+ gets 7.16 GB free space, 210 MB being used by nothing. Is my Clip defective?
I just need an Clip+ user to confirm this size, because it doesn’t sounds normal to me.
My empty formatted Clip: http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/5508/clipx.jpg
Later edit:
Shows 7548 MB total memory under menu = 7.37GB real memory under drive properties. That means 210MB should be the firmware.
On my old 8GB Clip: 7807MB under menu = 7.62 GB real memory under drive properties, 62.5 MB used by firmware.
That means= 250 MB difference between the 2 Clips total drive size, and 150MB difference between firmware sizes (firmware size represent the used space for an formatted Clip, seen under drive properties).
=> The 8GB Clip+ has 400MB less than the old 8GB Clip.
Also the 8GB size should be 8000MB = 7.81GB not 7548MB (7.37GB).
That’s an 452 MB space stolen by Sandisk.
If we calculate the firmware we get ~550MB of space lost.
Message Edited by icsterm on 10-19-2009 07:00 PM
Message Edited by icsterm on 10-19-2009 07:04 PM
