250Gb HDD.......my a**e!!!!

[andyfphoto]

....or for those over the water......my a*s!!!!
Can anyone let me know the secrets of manufacturers marketing depts that are allowed to blatantly market these products as 250 GB's when as soon as they are mounted they have only 233 available. Same goes for my 115 Qdisc and my two internal 200Gb drives, which give me 191.....that's 45Gb's of storage I've been duped out of. Surely they shouldn't be able to proclaim figures 8-10% higher than are actually available to the user????
Or is there something I'm not doing???

[Swampy]

It all depends on how you look at it. If you go to properties on the drive, you'll get two numbers.

Based on the sectors and formatted capacities, say, my 160gb drive will show 160gb capacity (unformatted) but after formatting, it ends up being 149gb available.

There's more explaination to it and most drive manufacturers will really explain it completely on thier websites and the boxes the drives are sold in. :) It's always been this way since drives were 5 megs 20 years ago. Of course, the difference 20 years ago was that a 5 meg drive still had a formatted capacity of somewhere around 4.95 megs and wouldn't seem as much of a difference. hehe

I'll agree that it's not a nice way to specify these things, kinda like monitors used to be advertised - 14" crt. Whoo. But the viewable was only 12.3 inches.

[KeithM]

It's the biggest cheat going...

When they claim 250Gb, what they mean is 250,000,000,000 bytes ! :soapbox:

They choose to use 'decimal' Gb ( 1,000,000,000 bytes ) not 'binary' Gb ( 1,073,741,824 bytes )

So for your 250Gb ( decimal Gb ) drive...

250,000,000,000 / 1,073741,824 = 232.8Gb ( binary Gb )

K.

[AzRich]

what Keith said.

AFAIK every HD manufacturer uses this math, so at least when you compare prices you are comparing apples to apples... er .. you get the idea.

[andyfphoto]

thanks guys, I had an idea it was something like that, but it really is in the realms of false advertising........
It reminds of the cost of petrol going up at each budget when I was akid and it was sold in gallons....they kept the jjumps to 1 or 2 pence a gallon, but then we changed to litres and guess what??? it still goes up in 2 or 3 pence stages!!!! Clever, or underhand.....

[Swampy]

thanks guys, I had an idea it was something like that, but it really is in the realms of false advertising........
It reminds of the cost of petrol going up at each budget when I was akid and it was sold in gallons....they kept the jjumps to 1 or 2 pence a gallon, but then we changed to litres and guess what??? it still goes up in 2 or 3 pence stages!!!! Clever, or underhand.....

I sorta agree there, however, it is stated on the boxes and websites and stuff, unlike when monitors were just advertised as "14"" or "15"" and were never explained up front that they were only 12 and 13" viewable. Thus the class action lawsuit a few years ago. The hard drive manufacturers have it down with the small print though, so they're safe.

[proberts]

It's a little worse than that too- the filesystem format you use can take up varying amounts of space, and for most modern filesystems, you can change cluster sizes, which affect how much empty space is used by files which partially fill the last cluster.

I've been thinking for a while now that it'd be interesting to write a filesystem where the filesystem's structures lived on a small drive, and the data was just end-to-end on another drive, so that you'd at least get full capacity on one side, and you could keep the metadata on the OS drive in a partition smallish. Unfortunately, it's not currently worth the overhead, though as drives get larger, it may become so. Dynamic partitions make this at least theoretically interesting- though it may just be time to either tune the heck out of a current filesystem, or just play with "My RAFs take up a single cluster" tuning...

Paul