Aug
23
Is this false advertising?
I bought an external hard drive today - a 320gb Seagate FreeAgent. $170 (i.e. about 50c a Gb), nice and sleek, should take care of our storage needs for a year or two. Had to reformat it for Mac using Disk Utility but that’s simple enough.
The thing is, after reformatting it I noticed that the available space was 297.88gb. What happened to the other 22.12gb???????
Rob - August 23, 2007, 10:54 pm
Simple explanation:
HDD manufacturers choose to count in decimal, while computers use a binary number system. So…
320GB = 320,000,000,000 bytes
Divide that by 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 298GB
Confused?
Manufacturers specify their devices as if a kilobyte is 1000 bytes, a megabyte 1000 kilobytes & a gigabyte 1000 megabytes
BUT there are actually 1024 bytes in a kilobyte.
So…
A real kilobyte contains two to the power of ten, 2^10, 1024, bytes.
A real megabyte contains 2^20, 1,048,576, bytes.
A real gigabyte contains 2^30, 1,073,741,824, bytes.
They can lose more capacity from the space taken up by formatting data. That can vary with the filesystem you use, but it looks like you’ve done alright there.
Hope this helps!
If not, read up on binary!
Marty - August 24, 2007, 11:18 am
I didn’t know that, so thanks. Clearly my missing 22.12gb never existed in the first place - except on the box it came in!!!!!!! So my accusation of false advertising still stands, i.e. the HDD that I bought should be listed as a 300gb drive.
On the box, in small print, it says:
“One gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes when referring to hard drive capacity.”
I suppose they think that covers it.
Sim - August 24, 2007, 8:05 pm
still…
it would make more sense for them to just call it a 298gb hard disk!?
if they’d never labelled it as 320gb at the very beginning, we’d never know…
anyway…
Marty - August 24, 2007, 8:21 pm
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying (I think).
Someone needs to sort out this whole nerds vs. normal people thing.
These days it’s not unfeasible for a household to have a non-wireless-enabled desktop, a wireless-enabled laptop, an ADSL modem, a wireless router, an external hard drive and a USB printer (and the instructions for all of them). But I’d bet anybody $500 that out of 100 households less than 5 would be able to set all that up so that a user can use the laptop to download a PDF, print it wirelessly, then save it to the HDD.
There’s a market opportunity there.
dad - August 24, 2007, 10:52 pm
Hey, I’ve got a good idea - let’s have 1024 microns in a millimetre, 1024 millimetres in a metre and 1024 metres in a kilometre. Do you think that would be less confusing?
Marty - August 24, 2007, 11:19 pm
LOL