I know there is always going to be some loss of space as compared to what the box says but its getting stupid. My 80gig is actually 76gigs. Thats not to bad right? Well then last year my 400 gig comes up 380. Missing 20gigs? Now yesterday I get a 500gig and its actually only got 465gigs. I got shorted 35 gigs?!?!? I can understand a little indescrepancy but it seems the bigger HDD you buy the more they lie on the box. I have never seen a HDD with MORE size then its supposed to have. Anyone else bothered by this? BTW this is more of a rant and to see if anyone else has noticed this. OH:
If you read the fine print, a lot of manufacturers class 1GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes - base10. However, computers (and Windows OS) uses the binary definition of 1,073,741,824 bytes - which is actually the correct one. So there is quite a difference and bigger the larger the drive. WD got into trouble for this fairly recently.
Not much I can do about it other then bitch. Just seems stupid as hell and I think it should be called a 465 gig hard drive if thats what it is >_< If anything they should give you more, not less.
There's no guarantee two identical drives will both format to 465GB which is part of the reason nobody has abandoned the old 1GB = 1000MB system, it's just globally accepted as being bollocks and nobody assumes they are getting a 500GB drive.
I didnt assume I was but 35gigs is alot to be missing!?! The margin of error should at least be smaller then that.
It's not a margin of error. You bought a 500GB drive, measured in base 10 (the same way you count). That's 500 * 1,000,000,000 = 500,000,000,000 bytes. Your computer is reporting GB in base 2 (the way computers count). So it is taking those 500,000,000,000 bytes and dividing by 1,073,741,824 to get 465GB which is what it reports. Either way you're still getting the 500,000,000,000 bytes you paid for. Standards bodies have tried to get software makers to use gibibyte (GiB) to denote base 2 measurement to prevent conflict with base 10 gigabyte measurements but so far it's a no-go. Basically GB can be base 2 or base 10 and you have to know how it's being used by whatever is giving you the value. This is why HD boxes note that they are using the base 10 measurement. Hope this explains things. -hl718
