1000 And 1024 Hard Disk 1000 instead of full 1024

[cyber_electrons 0]

I am using Seagate 160 GB HDD. When I check for the capacity, it turned out to be 150 GB only, 149 to be exact. Some people claims that Seagate uses 1000 mb as 1GB instead of 1024mb as 1GB and therefore seems like a drop in memory. Now some (maybe more) hard disk also uses 1000mb as 1gb. Scale up that extra 24MB makes quite a difference.Any thoughts?

[pasten 0]

Yes you got that right cyber_electrons. Actually it is calculated based on bytes. So what you call a 160 GB HDD is actually 160000.... something bytes. and hence when you covert that bytes into GB you get less value than 160 GB. I think its not the case with just Seagate, others do that too.

[andreip 0]

Yes I've heared that too. And also happened to me and some people said that if you format your computer several times it will decrease. But I don't know what to say about it xD.

[Ash-Bash 0]

That would be all the operating system and other files to do with the computer like the BIOS ect... that will still take up some. No harddrive capacity will be exact.

[Nabb 0]

You should be clear on the actual meanings behind the words kilobyte, megabyte, petabyte, etc. To comply with the International System of Units (SI), these terms should actually operate with powers of ten. In addition to this, the major standard-setting organizations such as the IEEE and ISO advocate the use of powers of ten. This means a kilobyte is 1,000 bytes, a gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes, etc.

 

For using powers of two, there are actually ways to show you want to use these. By taking the first two letters of the SI prefix and appending 'bi' (for binary) to the end, you get the terms kibibyte, mebibyte, etc. These explicitly show that you are talking about powers of two. To denote in symbolic form, you capitalize the initial character and add an 'i' in the middle - for example KiB for kibibyte, or 1024 bytes.

 

So you should be careful when you say you are getting ripped off - Seagate would be correct in saying that the hard drive has space of 160 GB (well it probably isn't exactly 160GB, but that's irrelevant). This 160GB fits the 'proper' conventions for GB, and if you want to talk about powers of 2, then the size is (about) 149GiB. You are not getting ripped off 7.4%.

 

Don't worry though too much, this mistake is commonly made - for example one of my computer science lecturers taught everyone the wrong conventions (and didn't see my hand when I was going to point this out - intentional? )

Edited March 10, 2009 by Nabb (see edit history)

[cyber_electrons 0]

To what I think, computers are binary systems and therefore I think they should use binary instead of SI. I totally understand all the standard units but my point here is the computer recognizes the harddisk using binary, the package should be using that number. But I guess it's just a business tactic. They were right, no lies involved.Now, the hardware businesses have sucessfully hide the 149GiB into 160 GB. Thanks very much for your input! Very helpful.

[BuffaloHelp 24]

It's because formatting a drive leaves with index sector, or so called boot sector, that cannot be used by regular access level. This is a default for any PC based format. I'm not sure with Mac format.I believe it has been and it will always be that about 8% ~ 15% will be lost from the claimed total capacity.

[truefusion 3]

I've had an experience once where Windows XP showed that i had around 60 gigabytes less than what was advertised. It was a 200gb HDD which i was reinstalling Windows XP on, and i couldn't believe just how much of the HDD i couldn't access. I thought i had been seriously ripped off. Interestingly enough, when i partitioned the drives for Linux and installed Linux onto it, i regained about 50gigs back. So this implies there may be more things to blame on how the size of the HDD that can be used is calculated.

[cyber_electrons 0]

Ah, interesting experience. It may be the OS programming which varies when calculating the size of HDD. But it is awfully strange to lose 60 gigabytes. Would you think it is the problem of HDD or is it really the problem of the OS? This kind of reduced size seems most likely to come from corrupted HDD.Surely, there indeed may be more things to be aware of when calculating the disk space.

[Alex Cicala 0]

Yes you got that right cyber_electrons. Actually it is calculated based on bytes. So what you call a 160 GB HDD is actually 160000.... something bytes. and hence when you covert that bytes into GB you get less value than 160 GB. I think its not the case with just Seagate, others do that too.

Western Digital are the worst for this, to them 640gb seems to be 600gb for them. The best I think are actually Seagate, my drive is 1tb turns out to be 993gb, which isn't much of a loss.