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I feel gipped...

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iParis

iParis

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jul 29, 2008
3,671
31
New Mexico
So today I go a 640GB Western Digital MyBook External Hard drive.
Turns out it's only 595GB's!
I mean I can understand 11GB's because that's about the amount I lost on my 160GB WD Passport external HD that ended up being 149GB's.
Damn disk format.
I'm a little concerned that if I would have gotten the 1TB or 1.5TB that I would have ended up being gipped something like 200GB (1TB) or even 350GB (1.5TB).
 
The bigger the HDD capacity is, the bigger amount of GB's will be lost from formatting.

For example. My 1GB memory stick only has a formatted capacity of around 940MBs. My 120GB MacBook only has 111.47GB's
 
Here we go again.

Hard Drive manufacturers use decimal measurements, so they equate 640GB to 640,000,000,000 bytes.

However, computers are binary, so they equate 640,000,000,000 bytes as 640,000,000,000/(1024^3) GB = 596.8 GB.

You haven't been gipped.

Edit: Rereading your original message it seems you understood what I explained above, sorry for stating the obvious. Yes, the bigger the HD, the bigger the difference between the stated and actual number of GB.
 
160GB -> 11GB "not there"
640GB -> 45GB "not there"

so 11GB for 160GB. 160GB is 25% of 640

so 11GB x 4 is ~44GB assuming linear loss

Gyp (sp) can be used normally indicating pain.
 
iParis said:
I do not understand the second part of your post.
Click to expand...

The file system isn't "eating up" a portion of the drive to cause what you observe... it uses a different counting system than the advertised capacity.

Every kilobyte in the filesystem has 1024 bytes, while every kilobyte of advertised capacity is only 1000 kilobytes.

So it scales up. The bigger the hard drive gets, the proportion by which the formatted capacity is smaller than the advertised capacity stays the same, but the actual size difference gets bigger.

It's like saying 1 kilometer = 0.6 miles. If you drive 10 km, that's about 6 miles. It's not 9.4 miles because you "already made the trade off in your first km."
 
iParis said:
I do not understand the second part of your post.
Click to expand...

I think he was saying that as a 160GB is 'missing' 11GB and 640GB is 4 times as big as 160GB then it will be 'missing' 4 times as much, that is 4*11 = 44GB which is approximately 45GB which is what you are missing.
 
mkrishnan said:
It's like saying 1 mile = 0.6 kilometers. If you drive 10 miles, that's about 6 kilometers. It's not 9.4 kilometers because you "already made the trade off in your first mile."
Click to expand...
Swap "mile" and "kilometer" and you'll be right.
 
Ok, it's because of formatting and difference in numbering that the manufacturer and the computer use.
The fact is I still can't store 640GB's of files.
 
iParis said:
Ok, it's because of formatting and difference in numbering that the manufacturer and the computer use.
The fact is I still can't store 640GB's of files.
Click to expand...

The fact is you can. You still have 640,000,000,000 (approx) bytes. You haven't lost anything.
 
The decimal conversion is right on compared to the base 2. Making it about 7% off when converted back

640 * .93 = 595.2

swiftaw did what you need for an exact conversion ... but 7% is a quick ballpark and easier to remember.
 
PlaceofDis said:
read the fine print on the box. says right there that its not actual capacity.
Click to expand...

You really expect people to read the warnings, read the manual, or read the fine print?

That's what lawyers are for, to help sue the big corporation for supplying illiterate customers.
 
You can't be serious? I thought everybody knew this...

The bigger the hard drive, the bigger the gap, it's simple, you don't loose any data, it's just HD companies fudging numbers to make their HDs look that tiny bit bigger...
 
Sun Baked said:
You really expect people to read the warnings, read the manual, or read the fine print?

That's what lawyers are for, to help sue the big corporation for supplying illiterate customers.
Click to expand...

yeah i know. but its not that hard to see or find on most of the packaging ive seen.

Schtumple said:
You can't be serious? I thought everybody knew this...

The bigger the hard drive, the bigger the gap, it's simple, you don't loose any data, it's just HD companies fudging numbers to make their HDs look that tiny bit bigger...
Click to expand...

NOW it is. but back when the practice started the difference was tiny and negligible. now that hard drive capacities are going up so fast and more readily available are we seeing people complain.
 
Agreed. Companies should start advertising the "real" capacity. Is there a technical reason advertised space is measured differently from calculated space? Because if there isn't, then I would call that false advertising, even if they "explain it away" on the box.

It's like buying a new car that's advertised with 500 horsepower, but in the fine print is says "actually only 300 horsepower"...
 
I'd bet it's more of an "ease of labeling" issue. Sure, they could all advertise based on binary capacity, but that would just make for some ugly numbers, ads and forum questions.

"Should I get two 465 GB drives or one 930GB?" Ick.

"MacBook Air with 59.52GB SSD, only $1799." Even worse.

Besides, as has already been noted, one still gets the full measure of the advertised capacity, it's just that the computer counts it differently.
 
iParis said:
Actually, I think it's 596GB, not 595GB.



Then they should sell and advertise it as the actual capacity.
Click to expand...


Oh please. Do you really see companies offering things like a 14.57 GB iPod touch or a 147.9 GB hard drive?
 
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