Real and advertised hard drive sizes - why you don't get all the space you pay for.

[Peter M]

Once again:

DRIVES DO NOT HAVE LESS CAPACITY THAN ADVERTIZED.

Drive advertizing uses the abbreviation "GB", which denotes THE DECIMAL UNIT. So you can expect your "200GB" drive to have 200,000,000,000 bytes, no more.

As pointed out above already, the wrongness is in fact on the other end - 200 GB are about 186 GiB. If your software shows that as "186GB", then the software is bull not the drive advertizing.

[mujjuman]

oh i see.... so the real way to write "gigabyte" is GiB

[nevtime]

I would like to point out a few things I have learned over the years. First, the only place in any part of the computer industry a MB is 1,000k is hard drive makers. No other part of the computer world sees it that way.

Some of you who have been around will remember this, back in days when computers were first being made to actually be for home use, whole programs fit on a 5 1/4 floppy that held 360k of data max. When very small hard drives, by todays standards, were costing much more then massive hard drives cost today, the difference of even a 1/4 MB was a major difference.

So at some point, one of the drive makes decided to use the 1,000k to inflate the space of there drives to give them selfs an edge on the market. It was a simple marketing ploy. And of course, all the others followed to even the playing field.

The 1,024k = MB standard was defined way back in the 50's when the very first punch card computers were built. Before there was really such a thing as a hard drive as we know it today. In fact I remember my dad having a true 10 MB hard drive. And the famous last words, "I will never fill that much space up". We never let him forget that.

It is the same concept as when AMD actually started to make there CPU's that could keep up with Intel's. At that time, Intel was losing too much of the market too fast. So Intel's quick answer was to lessen the amount of data processed within a clock cycle. And because the number of clock cycles per second is what the speed rating of a CPU is based off of, Intel showed much higher click speeds then AMD, which is why the use the + rating on there CPU's.

Which explained why a 2 gig'ish AMD 3000+ would benchmark around the same as an Intel 2.8-2.9 gig CPU. Regardless of the number of clock cycles per second, the actually amount of data processed per second was close to the same.

Enjoy~

[ru1di]

Thank you nevtime - that explained everything.

[elroy]

I sold off a pair of used Maxtor 160gb drives and bought a pair of new Seagate 160gb drives. Mostly for the longer warranty. After installation and formatting I found out each Seagate was about 4gb smaller formatted.

I wasn't to happy.

[mujjuman]

hey thanks for those facts! very interesting read

[elroy]

Originally Posted by nevtime

It is the same concept as when AMD actually started to make there CPU's that could keep up with Intel's. At that time, Intel was losing too much of the market too fast. So Intel's quick answer was to lessen the amount of data processed within a clock cycle. And because the number of clock cycles per second is what the speed rating of a CPU is based off of, Intel showed much higher click speeds then AMD, which is why the use the + rating on there CPU's.

IBM/Cyrix started the "+" cpu ratings. They started putting out chips with a larger cache that were able to perform nearly the same as faster Intel Pentium chips. Some examples: Cyrix 300 actually ran at 233mhz. The Cyrix 366 actually ran at 300mhz. Their 166 ran at 133mhz. They did this as far back as the 100 or 120 mhz chips but I don't remember the exact speed differences.

This was the first processor company to utilize an "oversized" cache to greatly enhance performance. Now Cyrix is totally forgotten and AMD and Intel are playing the "my cache is bigger than yours game".

Regarding actual drive size. When installing a drive over 120gb you should review this link. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305098
If your registry doesn't have this entry the day your data crosses the 128gb or 137gb line you may have BIG problems. The service packs are supposed to address this issue and install the correct registry entry but it doesn't always work. There is a little .reg file available on the web that will make this entry for you. Run a search for it.

[mujjuman]

thanks... i DEF dont want to run into that problem

[ghoste]

Peter M:

What hard drive manufacturer do you work for? Do you know the history of this IS & how this measure was established?

Lets see. Let's blame everyone else, OSs, utilities, other software, computers, processors, flashcards, etc, because they are reporting a binary number as a GB, MB, etc, a convention that predates this particular IS. Which label makes sense technically for computers and how they work?

And which # works better to inflate capacity as a sales tool. Who benefits from the confusion? Who is creating the confusion? It is the only reason hard drive manufacturers have for not following the historic norm for this measurement in computer technology.

But you do "win" on a technicality! If you post it enough times here, others might even believe in your "rightness" over those stupid enough around computers to not be aware that HD manufacturers are using a different scale.

Dave

[nemowolf]

Originally Posted by ghoste

Peter M:

What hard drive manufacturer do you work for? Do you know the history of this IS & how this measure was established?

Lets see. Let's blame everyone else, OSs, utilities, other software, computers, processors, flashcards, etc, because they are reporting a binary number as a GB, MB, etc, a convention that predates this particular IS. Which label makes sense technically for computers and how they work?

And which # works better to inflate capacity as a sales tool. Who benefits from the confusion? Who is creating the confusion? It is the only reason hard drive manufacturers have for not following the historic norm for this measurement in computer technology.

But you do "win" on a technicality! If you post it enough times here, others might even believe in your "rightness" over those stupid enough around computers to not be aware that HD manufacturers are using a different scale.

Dave

Welcome to TechIMO but i think your beating on a year old horse my friend...