Hello,

I recently bought a 320 GB external and created a large HFS+ partition and a small Fat 32 partition (for sharing files and such).

My question is that when I created the HFS+ partition, I checked the used size and the HFS+ partition was already taking up 68 MB. There was also nothing in that partition as it was newly created. I am just curious if you guys also had noticed something similar.

Thanks,

Fazer

Sounds normal to me. Just like any other file system, HFS+ takes up space for its own file structure files, and various hidden files you don't see. Don't worry, it's not mysteriously sucking up space. :)

One possibility is that the default HFS+ system on OS X in Panther and Tiger is the journaled kind - there's a small amount of data in place that helps keep track of some file changes, so there may be a hidden index. I don't think it has anything to do with Spotlight, since presumably Spotlight keeps all its info in a single index regardless of the attached drives.

The other fact is that a 300gb hard drive, as advertised, is not 300gb. It is actually 300,000,000,000 bytes, if you read the fine print. When you divide that by 1024 (amount of bits in a byte), you actually get about 292GB of space. Then from there, you lose space for the partitioning and what not.