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FollowSnow Leopard Reports Hard Drive Capacity “Correctly” (in Base 10)
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ZDNet reports that Snow Leopard has changed the way it calculates disk capacity from earlier versions of OS X: now it matches the advertised size of the drive you purchased it's actually accurate. When it's running Snow Leopard, your Mac shows you the same gigabyte count on your drives as appear on the manufacturer's box, calculated in base 10, and not in base 2, which is what Leopard, all earlier versions of OS X and all current and earlier versions of Windows uses. This Apple knowledge base article explains:
A 200 GB drive shows 200 GB capacity (for example, if you select the hard drive's icon and choose Get Info from the Finder's File menu, then look at the Capacity line). This means that, for example, if you upgrade from an earlier version of Mac OS X, your drive may show more capacity than in the earlier Mac OS X version.
My own tests confirm: a 4GB Cruzer thumb drive in my Snow Leopard Mac shows up with a capacity of 4.01GB. Leopard reports the same drive's capacity as 3.74GB. (Click to enlarge the screenshot on the right.)
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