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Opinions on how HDD capacities are calculated
Posted: Sat Mar 18, 2006 1:44 pm
by Sovereign
What do you think? HDD manufacturers say 1GB = 1 billion bytes, but Windows says 1GB = 1024MB (and 1MB = 1024kB etc). I don't do other OSes so I can't say whether Linux etc do this. Do you think someone should even the standard out? I heard somewhere a while back about a case pending against the HDD companies for "false advertising." Anyone heard about it recently?
Posted: Sat Mar 18, 2006 3:49 pm
by DMB2000uk
Its a subject that cant really be standardized,
Because in the real world, lol, a 'kilo'-something means a thousand.
But in the computing world, with stuff based in bytes, storage is usually calculated in factors of 8 (closest to 1000 is 1024 etc.)
So the HDD people thought that the easiest thing they can to to cut costs is to use 1000 bytes in a KB, when in reality its 1024B.
Hope that helped a bit.
Dan
But there are strange things going on with capacities, I have 2 identical HDD's and one of them according to windows has 181 GB and the other one has 186GB (using 1024 B in a KB, otherwise 195 GB and 200 GB). So windows must use some of the drive in some weird formatting that stops it reading part of the drive!