Formatting an External HDD Question...

[djearlybird]

I just bought a 500GB hard drive today. Why is it only showing 465.53GB availible when I haven't even added anything to it! I did a reformat in Disk Utility, but its still not showing the full 500GB. Now I realize that you never do get the full memory value when you purchase storage(like for digital cameras), but to lose 35GB of advertised storage, this can't be right, is it?

 

[AuroraProject]

Yes, that's correct. You lose right around 7% of the drive when formatted. 500*.07=35, so 465 available is correct.

 

[djearlybird]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A93 Safari/419.3)

7% = Total Scam

How would this not be considered false advertising? I read the fine print that came with it, not mentioned once, nor could I find it on the WD website. I'm just curious what the 7% is used for, if the drive is clean, any opinions?

 

[AuroraProject]

It comes down to binary vs decimal, here's an explanation:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/geom/formatBinary-c.html

 

[aaronw1986]

Ugh, this topic comes up like every day.