Hard drive- Storage Loss

[Darren]

People are buying bigger hard disk drives, but are loosing a huge portion of space because of the way hard drive companies and windows calculate 1GB/1024 MB /1000 MB

Post your hard drive's model number, size, and the amount of space you loose because of windows.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS 320 GB

Windows detects 298 GB

[Poisonsnak]

Also file system overhead applies.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 ST3200822AS 200GB Windows detects 186GB

[magibeg]

i'm not sure if its a windows detection problem or if the space just isn't there because of the harddrive companies rounding up so much, i'm sure eventually a lawsuite will happen if this keeps going the way its going

[Poisonsnak]

No, it's exactly as Darren has pointed out, when a hard drive company says a hard drive has 200GB of space they mean it has 200 x 10^9 bytes, but Windows traditionally considers 200 GB to be 200 x 2^30 bytes

It's just like DSL, when you get 1.5Mbps DSL it's 1.5 x 10^6 bits/sec even though it translates to only about 180 KBps or 180 x 2^10 bytes/sec

Though this is confusing imho the proposed solution is even stupider:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte

[Darren]

eventually a lawsuite will happen if this keeps going the way its going

I hope so, iam sick of not getting the storage space advertised, I dont have alot of money to spend on upgrades, but when I do upgrade I expect to get the advertised product.

[i_am_mustang_man]

there isn't a difference, really, between the two numbers, just in the way it's calculated. poison already said it pretty concisely, so ya. maybe people should just realize this, and then they'll be able to see through the marketing. it's not incorrect info tho.

also, the Mbps vs. MBps thing ticks me off when they say (sound this out) em bee pee ess or em bee per second. if it's verbal, assume it's the slower. caveat emptor

[g12rxz]

i would have to agree that the way hard disk sizes are calculated really is misleading.

http://img.techpowerup.org/060819/hd.jpg

This is my brand new, formatted with the seagate software " 250gb " hard drive.

[stealthfighter]

Overall: 122,926,776,320 bytes
Thats almost 123GB. Windows detects 114.

[karolpl2004]

[2] Seagates ST3160021A 160gb, (i call em twins :D) . windows detects them as 149GB. Total loss: 22GB. Microsoft and hard drive companies should really start being on the same page... many think they are paying for more than they are acctually getting.