I just bought the Lacie External HD 200GB but when I hooked up it was missing like 10 gigs!!! what's up????
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Lacie External HD missing GIGS???
- Thread starter forthebrave
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One of the problems with HD manufacturers is that they consider a gigabyte as 1000 megabytes... it is actually 1024 megabytes (because that's how the computer figures it.) If you look on the box (I know it's this way on the Western Digital drives) it details what they consider the terminology to be. That's probably why it's reporting as 195GB:
(200GB * 1000)/1024 = 195.3125GB
(200GB * 1000)/1024 = 195.3125GB
Almost true.jobutex said:
They actually use 1000 (instead of 1024) all the way from byte, so its actually even smaller.
200 000 000 000 byte / 1024*1024*1024 = 186GB
Didn't you ever wonder why your Mac internal drive was only 74.5GB instead of the advertised 80GB or 37 instead of 40, etc?
combatcolin said:My 500GB
Dude...did you try FAT32 or HFS+? 33 GB sounds like too much. I lost 5 GB on my 60 GB drive in NTFS.
Actually, now that I think about it, proportionally, 33 GB sounds just about right...maybe even a little low...
You did not loose the 33GB because of formatting.combatcolin said:My 500GB
The drive is wrongly sold and markedet as a 500GB, while it actually is 467GB. Because the manufacturer use 1000 instead of 1024 bit in a kilobit.
Because harddrive manufacturers count 1 GB as 1 000 000 000 bytes and a computer counts 1 GB as 1024 MB = 1024^2 KB = 1024^3 bytes any harddrive with size given in GB will be ~93% of the given size. So a 60 GB disk is really ~56 and a 500 GB disk is ~465... just as combatcolin experienced, and others have explained...
Kind of stupid, and there has been some talks about a class action suit (which would be even more stupid, but that's for the political forums), because of this practice...
Formatting, on large, modern disks should not take noticable space, just a couple of MB, which were an issue when large disks was 200 MB some 10-15 years ago, but with more than 1000 times larger drives you don't have that problem...
Kind of stupid, and there has been some talks about a class action suit (which would be even more stupid, but that's for the political forums), because of this practice...
Formatting, on large, modern disks should not take noticable space, just a couple of MB, which were an issue when large disks was 200 MB some 10-15 years ago, but with more than 1000 times larger drives you don't have that problem...
solaris said:
When you buy a drive most people with some computing experience realise that they will not get the "full" size of the hard drive and expect to "lose some" after formatting.
As for proper descriptions, well it would be nice but if it was going to happen it would have done so by now.
And if one company did attempt to, by properly stating a 500GB HD as 467GB, another company would simply call theirs 500GB and put a small discalimer on the box, of course by then your intrested in the higher speced drive and you can guess where im going.
Never did happen with CRT monitors did it?
Thats true.hcuar said:
But you will never loose 33GB to "overhead" on a 500GB drive. Which is what I answered!