Oh silly me, so 500GB actually means...

cregser

Just got me a "500GB" Western Digital external hard disk from Komplett. So I powered it up and had a quick look to see if it was formatted/partioned etc. only to see "Total Size: 465GB".

Now I understand that HD manufacturers like to redefine 1GB as 1000MB, but that would give me 488GB - I'd loose 12GB, no biggy. But no, I loose 35GB because WD say 1GB = 952MB. Where they plucked that figure from, I have no clue. It seems like they rounded 1MB down to 1000KB and 1KB down to 1000Bytes and forgot to round 1Byte up to 10bits. But there isn't even 500,000,000,000 bytes, there's 25,135,106 less than that.

So how do these WD drives come so highly recommended when they sell me 36billion bytes short of the advertised 500GB? It feels like Who wants to be a millionaire? converting their call charges up from IRE£ to Euro while converting their prizes down - but at least they had some kind of an excuse...

</rant>

PogMoThoin

Its all companies that do this, not just WD. It'd be 500gb of Fat storage but you're gonna loose loads when you convert to Ntfs. Bought 320gb external & it ended up 295 by the time i formatted to ntfs.

Cuddlesworth

Bit of a rant there allright

secret_squirrel

cregser wrote:

Just got me a "500GB" Western Digital external hard disk from Komplett. So I powered it up and had a quick look to see if it was formatted/partioned etc. only to see "Total Size: 465GB".

Now I understand that HD manufacturers like to redefine 1GB as 1000MB, but that would give me 488GB - I'd loose 12GB, no biggy. But no, I loose 35GB because WD say 1GB = 952MB. Where they plucked that figure from, I have no clue. It seems like they rounded 1MB down to 1000KB and 1KB down to 1000Bytes and forgot to round 1Byte up to 10bits. But there isn't even 500,000,000,000 bytes, there's 25,135,106 less than that.

So how do these WD drives come so highly recommended when they sell me 36billion bytes short of the advertised 500GB? It feels like Who wants to be a millionaire? converting their call charges up from IRE£ to Euro while converting their prizes down - but at least they had some kind of an excuse...

</rant>

500Gb is the unformatted capacity. It goes down when you format it.

How much depends on what filing system is used.

Why should manufacturers specify an amount based on a particular OSes formatting option, when the drive can be formated in dozens of different ways? Eg Fat16, Fat32, NTFS, JFS, EXT2, EXT3, MACFS (cant be bothered to find out its real name), OSX fs.

Educate yourself before ranting. Its not their faylt its yours. If you care that much about a few Mb, go find an OS with a more space efficient filing system.

majiktripp

Its the 7% rule,all hard drives sizes are ALWAYS exactly 7% smaller than there advertised size so 500 x .93 = 465GB

cregser

Filesystem or no, I found the text on the bottom of the box that says "1 gigabyte (GB) = 1 billion bytes". And I was expecting to loose some but didn't know it was 7%, cheers.

secret_squirrel wrote:

500Gb is the unformatted capacity. It goes down when you format it.

How much depends on what filing system is used.

Why should manufacturers specify an amount based on a particular OSes formatting option, when the drive can be formated in dozens of different ways? Eg Fat16, Fat32, NTFS, JFS, EXT2, EXT3, MACFS (cant be bothered to find out its real name), OSX fs.

Educate yourself before ranting. Its not their faylt its yours. If you care that much about a few Mb, go find an OS with a more space efficient filing system.

Hey, this is my rant! :rolleyes: But it feels good, doesn't it?

awhir

krazy_8s wrote:

Bit of a rant there allright

DEFO

tba

Its not the size of your HD its the quality of the porn you have on it that counts.

SickBoy

tba wrote:

Its not the size of your HD its the quality of the porn you have on it that counts.

Amen

Cuddlesworth

tba wrote:

Its not the size of your HD its the quality of the porn you have on it that counts.

Lol..............


500+gigs :eek:

astrofool

well you don't really "lose" anything (bar the formatting space), most people think in terms of 1000mb = 1 gig as well, esp. when working out how much they can store, its only the OS that uses the odd (if you didn't know why) convention of 1024mb.

L31mr0d

Its funny when I had my old 5gig HDD, ending up with 4.65gigs didn't seem to bother me. Now that I have a 500gig HDD, losing 35gigs (7 times the total space of my old drive) smarts a little.

Syth

secret_squirrel wrote:

MACFS (cant be bothered to find out its real name), OSX fs.

Mac OSX uses the HFS+ filesystem.

I had similar experiences when I got a 250GB HDD. I formatted it as ext3 but it used up about 30GB, reiserfs uses only 1GB and reiserfs4 used a few megs AFAIR.

Anti

tba wrote:

Its not the size of your HD its the quality of the porn you have on it that counts.

you are right on so many levels !

DublinWriter

tba wrote:

Its not the size of your HD its the quality of the porn you have on it that counts.

Profound.

Anyways, a Mini technically holds 8 people if you take all the seats out.

Same deal with HDs.

OP - your OS needs a place on the disk to hold the index of where it keeps its files.

maidhc

cregser wrote:

Filesystem or no, I found the text on the bottom of the box that says "1 gigabyte (GB) = 1 billion bytes". And I was expecting to loose some but didn't know it was 7%, cheers.

I'm with you on this.

it is like advertising the square footage of a house and including the unusable attic space and sewer pipe going out to the road.

FX Meister

That's not a
very good comparison maidhc. If you want to use it though then the advertising for a house should be based on what furniture you have in it. It doesn't work like that.

Gone West

noob.

maidhc

FX Meister wrote:

That's not a
very good comparison maidhc. If you want to use it though then the advertising for a house should be based on what furniture you have in it. It doesn't work like that.

No.. the furniture is the "data"... attic space and so forth are the overheads.

Anyway I post below a section from a Sandisk SEC report for the OP if he considers bringing a challenge against this practice:

On February 20, 2004, the Company and a number of other manufacturers of flash memory products were sued in the Superior Court of the State of California for the City and County of San Francisco in a purported consumer class action captioned Willem Vroegh et al. v. Dane Electric Corp. USA, et al., Civil Case No. GCG 04 428953, alleging false advertising, unfair business practices, breach of contract, fraud, deceit, misrepresentation and violation of the California Consumers Legal Remedy Act. The lawsuit purports to be on behalf of a class of purchasers of flash memory products and claims that the defendants overstated the size of the memory storage capabilities of such products. The lawsuit seeks restitution, injunction and damages in an unspecified amount. The parties have reached a settlement of the case, which is pending final court approval.

I know the lawyers got around $2.5million, and I suspect the plaintiff was made an offer he could not refuse. I suspect such a claim would be equally viable in this jurisdiction, although I can't see there being a great scope for damages.

CuLT

astrofool wrote:

well you don't really "lose" anything (bar the formatting space), most people think in terms of 1000mb = 1 gig as well, esp. when working out how much they can store, its only the OS that uses the odd (if you didn't know why) convention of 1024mb.

"People think" a lot of incorrect things. This is one of them.

Consumer ignorance never fails to astound me.

astrofool

I'm sure you could write a patch for Windows which would show diskspace as 1gig = 1000mb

CuLT

astrofool wrote:

I'm sure you could write a patch for Windows which would show diskspace as 1gig = 1000mb

And I could make a map of the world being flat.

secret_squirrel

Much easier to put a program in the startup menu that pops up a msgbox that says "Its 500Gb Unformmated you tool!"

MunsterCycling

I'd like to order a Map?

astrofool

secret_squirrel wrote:

Much easier to put a program in the startup menu that pops up a msgbox that says "Its 500Gb Unformmated you tool!"

Have you even read the thread at all? It is not 500Gb unformatted, the formatting takes up a minute amount of space in reality with most of the percieved space lost being instead due to the 1000mb to 1024mb conversion.

secret_squirrel

astrofool wrote:

Have you even read the thread at all? It is not 500Gb unformatted, the formatting takes up a minute amount of space in reality with most of the percieved space lost being instead due to the 1000mb to 1024mb conversion.

Yes I did.

I suggest you read the thread again and then check the specs on the western digital site as I did.

That drive is 500107 Mb = 488Gb (at 1024 Mb to a Gb)

Therefore Cregser has lost 12Gb to WD's bad maths, and 23Gb to Formatting.

If you are going to 'correct' someone - get your facts right.

astrofool

secret_squirrel wrote:

If you are going to 'correct' someone - get your facts right.

I don't usually quote Wikipedia, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk#Capacity_measurements

Feel free to edit it if you feel its facts aren't straight.