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Actually, I think it's 596GB, not 595GB.



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

its marketing. again it says on the box i'm sure that its not the actual formatted capacity. it IS 640GBs according to their definition of it. the computer just reads it as a different capacity.
 
Oh please. Do you really see companies offering things like a 14.57 GB iPod touch or a 147.9 GB hard drive?

who says they'd do that?

couldnt they simply produce it to have 150 gibiytes and have the decimal form be a weird number?

granted they would have to be a transition time where it seems as if hd capacities didnt change lol
 
wow well you learn something new every day. I had no Idea an HDD was measured that way. I always thought it had to do with partitioning or something. ty.
 
Then they should release it with a binary number of 640GB.
They'd just have to raise their number to like 690GBs.
 
I get confused with the difference between the two also.. I don't know why they can't have just created it in the first place to be easy to understand and work like the rest of the system.
 
If it makes you feel better, RAM is in base 2, ie. 2GB = 2048 *true* megabytes (each = 1024 bytes).

Not sure which measurement SSD drives and memory cards like SD, etc is measured in - I think base 2, as they come in 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512MB before they get to 1GB, so I assume 1GB = 1024.
 
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.

This is not an excuse. Would you buy a car that's advertised as getting 50 MPG, but you get it home and it only gets 30 MPG because the car "counts it differently"?

It's an advertising con, nothing less, imo.
 
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"...

Actually, they do the same thing. They advertise as having lets say bhp 300 hp and the car will make around 270 whp... whp is the number that is actually making it to the ground.

:D
 
Wouldn't it be easier to just advertise hard drives IN 1024 notation? just round up/round down to the nearest decimal increment? for example instead of saying its 59.92GB formatted round it to 60GB for marketing.. if its 59.12GB then 59GB?

It still pisses me off that hard drives in this day and age are advertised as 640GB when you really do get ~595GB to really store files, yeah all your files might take the 640GB due to using 1024 vs 1000 but its still "lost space" after you've partitioned and formatted the drive since the OS reports that 595GB are free to use.

Btw is it the partition map that takes up the space 11GB 22GB 44GB etc when a drive is partitioned and formatted depending on the capacity?
 
its marketing. again it says on the box i'm sure that its not the actual formatted capacity. it IS 640GBs according to their definition of it. the computer just reads it as a different capacity.

Why not stick with the way the computer actually reads the hard drives then instead of playing with this ******** base 10 crap marketing?

Why advertise the space as 640GB lets say base 10 and have the computer say nope its only 595GB after its partitioned and formatted? or is the difference in space going towards the partition map since we're up to hundreds if not thousands of GB already.
 
The first problem with hard disk drive capacity is that manufacturers assume that kilobyte (KB), megabyte (MB), gigabyte (GB) and terabyte (TB) are different things from what they really are, making you to have a hard disk drive with less capacity than advertised. This problem is known by several names, like “rounding”, “formatted capacity vs. unformatted capacity”, etc. Some people even wrongly assume that the operating system is the villain behind the vanishing of space, but the truth of the matter is that the hard drive manufacturers are the one to blame, as they announce their products with a capacity higher than the real drive capacity.

For example, hard disk drive manufacturers assume that 1 GB equals to 1 billion (10^9) bytes, while in fact 1 GB equals to 1,073,741,824 (2^30) bytes.
Let’s take a real example, Seagate/Maxtor DiamondMax 21 hard disk drive with “250 GB”. It is announced as being a 250 GB hard disk drive, having 488,397,168 sectors. With this number of sectors we can easily find out that the capacity of this hard disk drive is of 250,059,350,016 bytes, or 232.88 GB and not 250 GB. So here is why your 250 GB hard drive is only formatted with 232 GB: it IS a 232 GB hard drive!
 
Frustrating to be sure. It has never made sense to me that companies would measure using a method that isn't used by operating systems. It makes sense for nice neat rounded numbers, but its still ridiculously stupid.


At any rate, it could be worse, my 2TB enclosure shows a "missing" 140GB, so it could be worse.
 
This thread gets done once every month or two, and everything that really needs to be said has been said. Not that there's anything that hasn't already been repeated multiple times in this thread to find, but if you forum search for the previous iterations of this, you can read more of this bickering to your heart's content. I'm going to wish you a Merry Christmas and merrily close the thread before there are casualties. ;)

P.S. Regarding the only new wrinkle to this version, I would have to say we Americans may be partially to be blamed, since this expression is (rarely) used here and at the same time, most of us have actually met an honest-to-goodness Roma.
 
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