Usable capacity of iPod touch?

**andrew.wilson** · 9th September 2007, 07:34 PM

I think I have finally decided to settle on a touch over a classic for my new iPod

My question now is what size? My current iPod has just over 7 gig on it but there is a lot of crap on that. Currently I have about 5 gig on my iTunes of music, so will need 4-5 gig of storage for my music on iPod..which may grow, depending how I manage it. I want to use it for movies/tv shows as well. I am happy with low quality for those though. I managed to play with visual hub to shrink one movie down to 60mb and still have a decent quality for 'iPhone' settings. I don't really want it for photos.

I am poor (thank you 3 and a half years of Woolies!) so really want to go the cheapest option there is.

My main question is about how much usable capacity there will be on the iPod touch? I know that with hard drives there is never actually 8gig for example, it is closer to 6.5 or 7 etc. But I was unsure what that is like with flash drives???

If the useable capacity is 7+ then I think that will seal the deal for me

Does anyone know or want to guess what the usable capacity will be like?

On a related note, I noticed this today on the Apple site and thought it was funny considering people whinging about the small capacity of the new iPod touch

**Chundermuffin** · 9th September 2007, 07:45 PM

^^Weird name for an album, IMO

My 8gig nano is 7.50 gig usable, so my guess is the touch is about the same. I once worked out that you lose ~70MB per gig when they convert from decimal gigs (what they advertise) to binary gigs (what you get and what computers actually use).

Only exceptions I know of are RAM and CDs, their capacities are advertised in binary.

**dolbinau** · 9th September 2007, 07:48 PM

The problem is with the iPod Touch I assume OS X and Safari etc.. would take more space than a normal iPods software..

**Jarrad S** · 9th September 2007, 07:54 PM

Originally Posted by Chundermuffin

^^Weird name for an album, IMO

My 8gig nano is 7.50 gig usable, so my guess is the touch is about the same.

I'd guess so too. I think my Nano is about the same (4Gb, 3.7 usable) so about 7.5 sounds right.

But the thing with the new Touch's is the OS running on them might be a bit chunky - I think the best guess would be to see how much space the 8Gb iPhone has left after OS and formatting, and then take a stab in between the 7.5 usable and the leftover of the iPhone.

**Linux_insidev2** · 9th September 2007, 07:57 PM

Iphone firmware takes up around 300mb IIRC, ipod touch should be less.

**MightyAtom** · 9th September 2007, 07:58 PM

The iPhone capacity is 7.45GB, usable space is 7.24GB.

**Sambo** · 9th September 2007, 08:06 PM

I know an easy fix.. 16GB iPod Touch!

**chrism238** · 9th September 2007, 08:08 PM

Originally Posted by dolbinau

The problem is with the iPod Touch I assume OS X and Safari etc.. would take more space than a normal iPods software..

With Safari's disk cache being a consumer, too...

**leon** · 9th September 2007, 08:42 PM

On the 8Gb model it looks like you lose about 1GB of space, and on the 16GB model it looks like you lose 2GB of space.

When you look at Apples specs page for the iPods, http://www.apple.com/au/ipodtouch/specs.html
it states that the 8GB holds 1750 songs. If you compare this to the 8GB Nano which holds 2000 songs, it appears that you lose 250 songs. As the 1GB shuffle holds 240 songs, you could predict that the touch holds about a shuffles worth of songs less than the nano.
For some reason the 16GB Touch loses even more capacity over the 8GB. It would appear that apple have simply multiplied the 8GB capacity by 2 to get the 16's capacity (in which case these have counted the operating system twice).

Hope this makes sense.

**andrew.wilson** · 9th September 2007, 08:51 PM

Thanks for the replies guys!

I was a bit confused because I know that you loose a fair bit of memory with HD based players, but it seems Flash is different, but you loose BG due to OS instead.

Thanks for the info. I think I am going to save up a little more and go for the 16gig thinking about it. It would mean I could have my current entire library (I am one who listens to all my music, not just has gigs of useless stuff) plus a fair bit of room for videos and use it for photo back up

Come on September 28th

**Marlor** · 12th September 2007, 12:04 AM

Originally Posted by leon

For some reason the 16GB Touch loses even more capacity over the 8GB. It would appear that apple have simply multiplied the 8GB capacity by 2 to get the 16's capacity (in which case these have counted the operating system twice).

The loss in capacity should be more in the 16GB than in the 8GB, since most of the "capacity loss" comes from the fact that storage manufacturers use a different definition of "gigabyte" than everyone else.

A Gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024^3). However, HDD makers and flash memory manufacturers define a Gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes. This means that you "lose" 7% of the capacity due to this discrepancy.

So, a 8GB iPod is really a 7.4GB iPod, and a 16GB iPod is really a 14.9GB iPod.

On top of this, 200MB is chewed up for the iPod touch's OS, but compared to the space that is lost due to the flash-memory capacity loss, this isn't a big deal.

Once all is said and done, an 8GB iPod will have 7.2GB available, and a 16GB iPod will have 14.7GB available.

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