Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming MC200 - True capacity?

Hi all

I saw this post on the MC200 owners thread a while back:


Per ControlMac I only have 80 Gig left myself, but that is still 200 or so FLAC albums (i.e. I can live with that for another year or so). If in reality I only have 20 Gig then I need to start thinking about an MD600 whilst the iPad discount is still on

Anyone know what the "true" capacity is?

Thanks

boru80

Have you looked in debug, eg: put the IP address of the MC200 into your PC/Mac web browser and add /debug to the end, this should give you actual capacity rather than 500GB disk space which is unformatted capacity.

Regards

Russ

Interesting - so you think there is a difference between what ControlMac and what debug says? I will check when I get home...just assumed they would be one and the same.

If you look carefully at the Website of Hard Drive Manufacturers and PC Makers, you will see that they usually have an *Asterisk next to their Hard DIsk Sizes (and sometimes RAM as well)

They will usually say something akin to 500Gb = 500 Billion Bytes........i.e. akin to saying that the steps between Kb and Mb are in Dividing by 1,000

However, PC's are obviously Binary Devices.......and steps that a PC OS will take to go from Bytes to Kilobytes will be to divide the number of Bytes by 2^10 = 1,024........and similarly with the step from Kb to Mb......and likewise from Mb to Gb etc., etc.

So if the Drive in the MC200 has 500Gb or 500 Billion Bytes.......can vary slightly from Drive Manufacturer to Manufacturer.........then you calculate the actual Drive Space as follows

500 Gb
----> 500,000,000,000 Bytes
----> 488,281,250 Kb
----> 476,837 Mb
----> 466 Gb

It is the above apparent "loss" that many people refer to when they talk about the "Formatted" versus "Unformatted" Size of a Hard Drive

All PC OS's have used the above 1024 Divisor.........until Mac OS changed recently on either Snow Leopard 10.6 or Lion 10.7 (can't remember which)......now the Finder on Mac's use a Divisor of 1000, just to match in with what people expect.........many Mac Apps will fall into line with that, but some still don't

All WIndows OS still use the 1024 Divisor to show Free Space etc.........I've always meant to check if they've changed on WIn 7, but maybe someone here knows

I'm pretty sure that Linux still uses the 1024 Divisor.......and that's important as Linux is the OS for the MC200, MC600, MD600, TwinStore etc.

So ControlPC, ControlMac and the Debug could actually report Different amounts of Free Hard Disk Space, even though the actual Free Space in Bytes will actually be identical

Hope that BS helps

Hi Ronnie,

Thanks for that info. It appears there is a minor discrepancy between debug (88Gb) and ControlMac (78Gb).

So I would have thought in theory therefore I have at least 78Gb free to fill up with music - it is not going to start giving me errors at 60Gb as per MJT8252s?

Thanks
Brian

I can't see any reason why it should but if it happened to me, I would ask my dealer to get Meridian to look into it using their remote diagnostics...

The MP3/AAC files are generated by the Core and take up disk space. If you don't use this function, disable it. I believe it also saves some "scratch space" for whatever reason. All I know is, when I filled up my MC200 I couldn't delete anything. Luckily my backups were good and I bought a TwinStore, oddly when I restored my albums to the TwinStore, the deleted albums were there again. I deleted and re-imported them just in case.

I disabled the storage using the windows utility and it wiped the music on the MC200.

-Mike

That's a bit odd that you can't delete anything once it's full. I do keep a backup but given that the export function seems to be a bit temperamental I hope I never have to use it.

I forgot about the MP3's...it's quite handy to have to save having to re-rip disks for iPod but I guess I just have to rip it twice to save the space....or else fork out �2.5k on an MD600

Cheers
Brian

Hi Brian,

It may just be the terminology you are using; but you should realy use the Sooloos Backup to take backups not the Export function.
The Sooloos Backup is faster, takes up less space and most importantly it is incremental; so after you have made a full backup it then only has to backup/update it with the changes to keep the backup set upto date.

The export function is for creating a music library for use by a 3rd party system.

Regards,
Carl

Hi Carl

Actually I have been using the export facility as opposed to backup

I had originally thought it might be useful having my tunes readily available in FLAC format on my network but in reality I don't really use it. If backup is more reliable and quicker then I will probably switch. Thanks for pointing that out!

Cheers
Brian

Backup seems to keep every album you ever had including stuff you may have deleted. So, it is different to export which mostly mirrors your live library.
Over time you can imagine backup becoming quite misaligned with no real way to edit/correct other than start a new backup.

Meridian recommend adding additional storage when disc gets more than 80% full. The system needs space for log files, housekeeping, transcoding and for storing playlists and saved focus'. I don't know if with larger storage the recommended free space remains proportional to disc size or is more static. I guess it depends how much transcoding space is needed.