16gb USB flash drive, Tesco €13.61

RobertFoster wrote: »

It all depends on how you define a Gigabyte:

Although most manufacturers of hard disk drives and flash-memory disk devices define 1 gigabyte as 1000000000bytes, software like Microsoft Windows calculates size in gigabytes by dividing the total capacity in bytes by 1073741824, while still reporting the result with the symbol "GB".

I don't know why there isn't a standard, probably to do with marketing when selling hard drives etc.

the standard in the computer industry was 1024=1K ,
720K floppies were 720 x 1024
that bit about 1 billion = 1G only came later on with the marketing droids
you loose 2.4% with K, twice that with M and 7.3% with G
1 terrabyte = 1,099,511,627,776 so you are loosing 10% of the capacity

Windows can be a pain as different parts of it prefer to show Bytes, K,M,G or sector units :mad:



Also there is an overhead as you have to store directories and lists of files, there is a trade off between the ability to store lots of small files using large indexes and finding files quickly with a small index. A small index means more space free , but larger allocation units means more space is wasted if you have many small files. These trade offs aren't as noticable with NTFS or EXT file systems. With NTFS you can define the size of the MST area which stores small files when you format the drive.

/stiff gutted I missed this offer