hard drive memory

  • Thread starter Thread starter marty
  • Start date Start date
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marty

hi ,i have just bought a external hard drive ,every thing works okay but i
was just wandering why it is only showing 465gb instead of the 500gb it was
advertised as being ,i mean thats a lot of memory, 35gb missing, if it's
only 465gb then thats what it should have on the box
 
The rest is overhead for the drive. 465 would be the available for data.
There is a great deal of overhead to get you to your data quickly.
 
hi ,i have just bought a external hard drive ,every thing works okay but i
was just wandering why it is only showing 465gb instead of the 500gb it was
advertised as being ,i mean thats a lot of memory, 35gb missing, if it's
only 465gb then thats what it should have on the box
Click to expand...


I agree with you that that's what it should have had on the box,
because 465GB is what it actually is.

All hard drive manufacturers define 1GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes, while
the rest of the computer world, including Windows, defines it as 2 to
the 30th power (1,073,741,824) bytes. So a 500 billion byte drive is
actually a little over 465GB.

Some people point out that the official international standard defines
the "G" of GB as one billion, not 1,073,741,824. Correct though they
are, using the binary value of GB is so well established in the
computer world that I consider using the decimal value of a billion to
be deceptive marketing.
 
The rest is overhead for the drive. 465 would be the available for data.
There is a great deal of overhead to get you to your data quickly.
Click to expand...


No, it's not a matter of overhead, it's matter of the definition of
what a gigabyte is. See the message I just sent to this thread.
 
thanks john for the reply ,as long as there is a reason for this i am happy i
asume that the bigger the hard drive the bigger the overhead
 
That size is correct. Your HD is advertised in decimal notation (numbers
that we're all familiar with) BUT computers understand binary notation (0 or
1).

1GB in decimal is 1,000,000,000
1GB in binary is 1,073,741,824

Therefore the actual size (read by computers) of a HD advertised as 1GB is
as follows:
1,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 = 0.9313GB (slightly less than 1GB)

In your case, 500GB is equal to the following:
500,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 = 465.66GB

So you see there's about 34.34GB "missing". The larger the HD size the
bigger the discrepancy. It isn't that big of a deal when HD size is 1GB
because there's 0.0687GB is "missing". When HD size becomes larger like
todays HDs, the difference becomes huge.

Hope that helps.
 
marty said:
hi ,i have just bought a external hard drive ,every thing works okay but i
was just wandering why it is only showing 465gb instead of the 500gb it was
advertised as being ,i mean thats a lot of memory, 35gb missing, if it's
only 465gb then thats what it should have on the box
Click to expand...

This has been hashed over countless times. Basically drive manufacturers
advertise their drives in decimal gigabytes = 1,000,000,000 or 10^9.
Computer folk think of gigabytes in binary gigabytes = 1,073,741,824 or
2^30. That means that your drive will automatically show as about 93% of
what you expected. That is the 465gB you noted. Then when you format the
drive a certain amount of space is taken up for "bookkeeping" functions
which explains even more loss of storage capacity.

Oh, and for quite a while drive makers have been making fine-print
admissions about the disparity in their advertised drive capacity and the
capacity which operating systems report. Sometimes the print is so fine as
to be virtually invisible but it is always there somewhere in the
specifications.
 
Ken Blake said:
Some people point out that the official international standard defines
the "G" of GB as one billion, not 1,073,741,824. Correct though they
are, using the binary value of GB is so well established in the
computer world that I consider using the decimal value of a billion to
be deceptive marketing.
Click to expand...

I wonder if there has ever been class action lawsuits filed against storage
manufacturers regarding misleading ads.
 
John Barnes said:
The rest is overhead for the drive. 465 would be the available for data.
There is a great deal of overhead to get you to your data quickly.
Click to expand...

WOW. That's a good one.

Where'd you find it? Where the sun don't shine?
 
John said:
I wonder if there has ever been class action lawsuits filed against storage
manufacturers regarding misleading ads.
Click to expand...

It never fails: every time I collect a new batch of messages, I find a
new moron.
 
Jim Moriarty said:
It never fails: every time I collect a new batch of messages, I find a
new moron.
Click to expand...

Thank you. If you read my other reply, you'd understand... or maybe not.
It's just too bad so many in this group jump to conclusion so quick and
decide to do name calling instead of understanding the situation.
 
that's my point i have checked the box and no-were on it does it mention the
discrepancy i have just read the fine print in the user manual and guess what
,there it was i would normally overlook it as it is so small and buried
amongst all the other specs that normal users like myself would not look at
or understand so perhaps now with ext hardrives getting so big and a lot more
common to every day users the makers should put both sizes on the box
 
Actually there has been a class action lawsuit - I seem to remember getting
a few dollars back for each Seagate drive I bought...

Dana Cline
 
Mick Murphy said:
It does not happen in External drives only, lol.
Check your Internal HD, lol.
--
Mad Mike



My Vista is hogging 82GB on my C drive just for system restore! lol....
its a 650GB drive though, but Vista see's it and uses it. lol.....
what ever happened to conservation?
Click to expand...
 
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