What is Digg?389 Comments
- jmpeagle, on 10/10/2007, -39/+223not only that, but did you know a QUARTER POUNDER is not a quarter pound? WTF. SUE SUE SUE.
- err0r503, on 10/10/2007, -11/+119Actually it is, before you cook the it, however, at no point in the process is a 100 GB drive 100GB's....
- derkmerkin, on 10/10/2007, -8/+97Some people are not properly understanding whats going on when you talk about GB in terms of storage versus a fancy short hand version(closer to scientific notation than computer terms) to give the felling of getting more, one is 1,000,000,000 and the other is 1,073,741,824 bytes. They may advertise that its 100GB(in terms of actual bytes) but really it should be 93.1 gigs. Drive manufacturers show sizes in terms that have similar names but different measures. In computer terms 1,024 bytes = 1 kilobyte not 1,000 bytes but in drive terms they prefer the 1,000 version. This problem gets worse the further away from the decimal point.
- justinjstark, on 10/10/2007, -7/+83The same is true with DVDs. When they say 4.7 GB, they mean 4,700,000,000 B which is only 4.377 GB.
- derkmerkin, on 10/10/2007, -10/+69The bag of crisps that you are eating has large amounts of air inside to create a pillow around the delicate crisps. So would you rather have a bag of crumbly crisps? The puffed up bag is not to fool you into making you think your getting more, it there to protect your eating experience.
- strom, on 10/10/2007, -2/+57Crisps are sold by weight. You get the same amount regardless of size.
- MusicalGenius, on 10/10/2007, -4/+53I'm sorry for abusing the comment system. But I though that this deserved to be here.. IT'S FROM THE ARTICLE (not me ranting more...)
"Now, before the geek squad begins flaming me about formatting issues, binary math and 1024’s and such, let me just say this. I understand that years ago the hard drive manufacturers got together and decided that consumers were too stupid to understand binary math, so they decided to start rounding off numbers (and in such a way that conveniently gave consumers an inflated perception of their drive’s capacity). My point is, they decided this back when drives topped out at around 5 or 10GB. I think that most consumers these days know what a decimal point is, and they could handle seeing a real world number listed below a hard drive in a catalog. I honestly would have no problem buying a Mac that listed its internal storage as 465.5GB."
I couldn't agree more with this. - maninblac1, on 10/10/2007, -6/+52Have you ever read the side of a retail HDD box? it says 1GB = 1000MB or 1GB = 1000000KB.
See this image for 1TB = 1000GB
http://www.fahad.com/pics/hitachi_1tb_hard_drive.jpg
Sometimes instead of a direct relation, they say, "formatted capacity may be less than listed capacity on some systems", or something like that.
A real GB is 1024MB. I wasn't born yesterday. - cspivack, on 10/10/2007, -4/+49FTA: "You may think, well, 925GB is more space than you’d ever need, but that is not the point (oh, and you’d be wrong. I filled that in a month)."
That's a LOT of porn. - polyGone, on 10/10/2007, -1/+43Well, yeah. It is 72.05701576gb larger, silly. :P
- Skurt, on 10/10/2007, -10/+46It's like the 'old' days when Televisions and Computer monitors used to be advertised as a 20" set when it really was a 19" set. "No, Really", "It is a 20" set", "You just can't see all the screen behind the bezel and the picture only covers 19" but the actual tube is 20". Liars...
On boxes at Wal-Mart back then you could see packaging that was both USA and Canada, the USA said it was a 18" monitor and the Canada side said it was a 16.9" monitor
I think the Hard Drive corporations should be held to the same standards, if it says it is a 100GB drive it better be at LEAST 100GB and NOT 87.23434225 GB - CiDaemon, on 10/10/2007, -2/+36This discussion has gone WAY off from the facts and the article in question. Let's get a few things straight here:
File tables, formatting data, and other integral structural space certainly exists on drives--and it certainly increases in proportion to the size of the drive and amount of data stored on it. It does NOT, however, ever take up more than 1% of the drive's unformatted (true) capacity at any time, no matter what the size or amount of data. File system data is negligible in size and would never take up the relatively large 8% or so discrepancy that this article is about.
Drive makers advertise UNFORMATTED CAPACITY, and I see nothing wrong with that, for two reasons: for one, formatting and file-system storage use varies across systems and formats--NTSC is less efficient than FAT32, etc. When you impose a formatting system on raw space, you can expect to lose some capacity--is this the drive maker's fault? Of course not! This comes to the second reason: as mentioned before, structural data is so small in comparison to free space that it really isn't an issue. You're getting 99.8% of the drive's added capacity, and that missing .2% is used to make your system faster and more functional.
Filesystem/formatting data IS NOT the problem being discussed here! The problem stems from two different parties using the same unit in different ways; drive makers use the SI (metric) system to count in large orders of magnitude: i.e. a "kilo" of something is 1000, etc. This was a arbitrary decision made by some of the first hard drive manufacturers and designers. Since a "kilobyte", under the metric system, is equivalent to 1000 bytes, they decided to advertise using metric prefixes under the assumption that everyone would understand them better--a matter of convienience, ranther than make up their own units/counting systems which were more applicable but less well-known. Other developers, in particular memory makers and software/OS programmers, instead use powers of 2 (in particular, powers of 1024) to express quantities. This method is more applicable to use in computer systems, and is analogous to the hexidecimal number system in that it makes working under the computer's hardware limitations (base 2) easier--since everything reduces to bits anyway, bases in powers of two (octal, hexidecimal, etc) are just more convenient to use.
The point here comes down to two different approaches to counting systems--an existing system (metric) vs. a new system which is more applicable (1024^n) to computer use. Before computers used internal or fixed drives, everything was based on the 1024^n system, and to make quantities easier to understand to their customers computer developers simply started using metric prefixes--kilo, mega, giga--because everyone understood them already. Even though they are not actually equivalent to their metric counterparts, these prefixes were close enough that customers could understand quantities in computer storage...and no one really worried about the 24^n discrepancy, because it wasn't a big deal--you bought a computer that totally used this new system (becasue there were no HDD drives using the metric system yet) and eveything was therefore equivalent.
When hard drives came along in personal computing, they did not conform to the new altered metric system, instead sticking to their SI units. Because of this, a storage (HDD) "kilobyte" is not equal to a memory "kilobyte", even though they share the same name. Initially, this wasn't much of a problem--hard drives were small, and so were files, so most people didn't care about the 8%-ish loss in capacity. As hard drives increase in size, however, this discrepancy becomes more noticeable, and as file sizes increase users find themselves using more space than ever before...people started paying attention to the numbers on hard drives, and wondering why they always seemed to come up short. Since the discrepancy between counting systems has been around for so long, no one wants to change it, especially with the computer market as large as it is now, changes on such an integral level are difficult. As such, the problem just has continued to expand.
However, some effort is being made to correct the computer counting system by using different, but similar, prefixes: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte . - spuffe, on 10/10/2007, -24/+54They need to advertise correctly... We should all complain, whenever we buy hard drives, that don't have the advertised capacity
- afx1, on 10/10/2007, -0/+27you fail
- digitmasher, on 10/10/2007, -1/+25The price of food is determined by weight.
- Shadowrose, on 10/10/2007, -9/+33Sort of. The problem, in all reality, lies in the definitions of units. A Kilobyte, as defined in SI Units, is 1,000 Bytes. A Kibibyte is 1,024 Bytes. It continues up. So a 320 GB Hard Drive is, in fact, 320,000 MB. However, people expect it to be 320 GiB. Which it, unfortunately, is not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte - Terr01, on 10/10/2007, -6/+28No, it's people trying to apply SI units to something which was never actually SI. I don't go around asking you to redefine a foot as 10 inches, do I?
- MusicalGenius, on 10/10/2007, -9/+28My NTFS File system didn't take 80 gigs just to format now did it? Moron
- Terr01, on 10/10/2007, -1/+19Mainly because "GiB" is the original "GB".
- KibibyteBrain, on 10/10/2007, -2/+20To distinguish, storage devices now usually list 10^n based capacities as xB while 2^N based capacities as xiB. For example, a 2^10 byte storage device would be 1 KiB, or Kibibyte, while a 10^3 byte storage device would be 1 KB, or Kilobyte. That's just the way it works for storage devices, deal with it. If you think that's bad, you should looks up some units Mechanical Engineers use...
- saltmiser, on 10/10/2007, -3/+20I agree, even if *technically* the hard drive companies aren't lying to you, they really *should* use the 1024 standard as that's what the os's use. but, since they're *allowed* to mislead the noob consumer like this, they will.
- SuperCow1127, on 10/10/2007, -3/+19Unfortunately, the hard drive manufacturers are the only ones who are actually RIGHT in this whole confusing mess. You see, the prefix Giga- traditionally means one billion of whatever unit follows it. It just so happens that in the early days of computers, due to everything being base 2 anyway, it was considerably more convenient to express values in powers of 2, instead of powers of 10. Though convenient, these measurements are inaccurate and incorrect.
In 1999, the IEC declared that from then on, all base 10 prefixes would become ONLY base 10 prefixes, and the base 2 variants would get a new name (kibi-, mebi-, gibi-, etc). This standard was then adopted by the IEEE in 2005.
So in reality, it is the operating system which is reporting the incorrect size. They are not giving you a value in gigabytes, but rather gibibytes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix - r3zonance, on 10/10/2007, -2/+18Actually, everyone EXCEPT hard disk manufacturers defines 1 GB as 1024*1024*1024. In fact as far as memory goes (which came before disk-based storage) it has always been 1024 as the base size, and not 1000.
Storage manufacturers "came up with" the 1000 idea to make it cheaper for them to make magnetic media of a certain size. - chingy1788, on 10/10/2007, -27/+42Its not misleading
Giga means 1 billion times not 1024^3, 1024^3 is a GiBi from by wikipedia
Mega means 1 million times not 1024^2
Kilo means 1 thousand times not 1024^1
So hard drive manufacturers aren't lying
Its just the other hardware screwing around with you - s1mph0ny, on 10/10/2007, -7/+22No, memory vendors actually sell you 2048MB when you order 2GB.
- JerodSlay, on 10/10/2007, -12/+26This is the most retarded article. On every hard drive box it defines GB as being 1,000,000 bytes. Windows and Mac define it as 1024 MB and a MB as 1024KB and a kb as 1024 bytes. If they change the naming convention, we will be forced to ask if the 500GB hard drive is a new 500 that formats to 500 or an old one that goes to 465. Just accept it that when you buy a "500" you're getting 5billion bytes.
- dnthomps, on 10/10/2007, -9/+23"If a car company were to put up a big sign advertising their new mini van had 100 cubic feet of cargo space, but it actually had about 75, do you think you would have the right to complain?"
Maybe car companies don't do this when speaking about cubic feet, but how often do you get that 37 miles to the gallon that was advertised on your car? - snafuhalitosis, on 10/10/2007, -5/+18That's the whole point, they should be rating the size of their hard drives based on the size of real GBs not this base 10 BS.
- robrichard, on 10/10/2007, -1/+13You are completely wrong. According to your computer 1 GB = 1024 MB = 1048576 KB = 1073741824 bytes. On the box of your hard drive or iPod there is a foot note that says 1GB = 1 Billion bytes. So for an "80 GB" hard drive you have 80 billion bytes. 80 billion divided by 1073741824 = 74.5GB. Partitions, Sectors, Tracks, Gaps, and Synchronization Fields are irrelevant.
- Firehed, on 10/10/2007, -9/+20No. 1GB = 1000MB, just as advertised. 1GiB = 1024MiB, a notation that all operating systems I've ever used are guilty as mislabeling as GB.
There's absolutely no need for the operating system to report the hard drive capacity in power-of-two units ("binary bytes" - GiB, MiB, etc) anymore. It's the fault of the OS manufacturers - just as it's their fault that your 4.7GB DVDs are reported in GiB size (4.4GiB or so) but labeled as GB.
As the units increase in size, so will the difference between the decimal and binary units. So while you'll "lose" 2.4% of a floppy disk, you'll "lose" nearly 10% of your shiny new 1TB drive.
Yes, it would be nice if hard drive manufacturers countered the misreporting of the operating systems by increasing the storage size, but wouldn't it be better for everyone if the OS developers simply patched in something that either changes the unit to be what it actually is, or re-determines the value based on the decimal value by which it's labeled? - Drevor, on 10/10/2007, -1/+12so?
My 2GB ram has exactly 2 147 483 648 Bytes because thats how a computer works.
My 1GB CF card has exactly 1 073 741 824 Bytes because thats how my camera works.
My 200GB hard disk has "roughly" 200 000 000 000 Bytes because ... well, because thats how business works. - ryouko, on 10/10/2007, -2/+13and a 2 x 4 is not 2 inches by four inches!
- greyfade, on 10/10/2007, -13/+24There has already been a class-action lawsuit on this matter. Giveup now - the court has ruled that the hard drive manufacturers are doing it fine.
Reasoning: A kilobyte (KB) is 1000 bytes. A KIBIbyte (KiB) is 1024 bytes. This is the accepted SI notation. So just STFU and accept it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte - LegOfLamb, on 10/10/2007, -1/+12After you cook it, it becomes a Royale with cheese.
- snafuhalitosis, on 10/10/2007, -5/+14The whole point is that it's a misrepresentation to define gigabytes and megabytes etc with a base 10 definition becuase 100% of the time when actually in use it uses the binary definiton.
- zachriggle, on 10/10/2007, -3/+12You, my friend, are an idiot. It has to do with the difference between
KiB = 1024 bytes = Windows Reports as a KB
KB = 1000 bytes = HDD Manufacturers use - KingBroseph, on 10/10/2007, -4/+13One again I learn more from just reading the comments then the actual article.
- prockcore, on 10/10/2007, -3/+12That's because memory MUST be in powers of two.
- banj0, on 10/10/2007, -0/+9So we're now in a world where prefixes outweigh suffixes and words aren't really words? "Giga" may mean 1 billion but "byte" means 8 bits. You wanna debate what "gigabyte" means? It seems language is screwing around with you.
- LGod, on 10/10/2007, -20/+29You mean, 1GB = 1024MB...
- greyfade, on 10/10/2007, -2/+11No, no one is saying the base-10 definition is traditional. The base-10 definition is the STANDARD. The International System of Units (SI) defines "kilo-" as 1000. "Kibi-" (Kilo-Binary-) is defined as 1024. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte
It'd help, actually, if people actually learned this instead of complaining incessantly about something that has already been decided in a court of law. - BHSPitMonkey, on 10/10/2007, -1/+10I've read dumber comments, though they really are hard to come by.
- s1mph0ny, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8You completely missed his point.
- therightclique, on 10/10/2007, -3/+10you're an idiot. 465 out of 500 is 93% and 46 out of 50 is 92% of the total volume. you're actually getting a higher percentage of usable drive space with the 500. either way, its the same ***** ratio, so you're NOT getting a WORSE deal with the 500, you jackass.
- greyfade, on 10/10/2007, -4/+11No, it really is 100GB as they say. It's not 100GiB (102,400MiB), true, but it certainly is 100GB (100,000MB)!
- wolferz, on 10/10/2007, -5/+12There are a lot of things in SI notation that don't line up with real world use. Every program out there that claims 10 GIGAbytes of usable space as a requirement means 10 x 1024^3 bytes of space, not 10 x 1000^3. The operating system reports 500 x 1000^3 bytes of space as 454 GIGAbytes. so forth and so on. Because some lawyer went before a judge and convinced him that semantics were more important than honest advertising doesn't make it true.
- pak314, on 10/10/2007, -1/+8My manager at work is a long time engineer from the drive industry. I asked him about this exact issue once. He told me early on they used the binary definition of MB. Then he told me one time, Apple decided to use the decimal definition of MB for the drives it bought. Soon all the manufacturers that used the old definition were at a disadvantage because their drives would look a few percent smaller and so they all started to move to the new definition. This also confuses me sometimes because some devices have performance benchmarks of MB/s with a decimal definition of MB. Again this boosts the numbers a few percent.
- monkeyvoodoo, on 10/10/2007, -2/+9Nope. Disk formatting uses next to no space on the drive. Read the other comments here!
mega = SI units. 1000 mega-bytes is 1 giga-byte
mebi = binary units. 1024 mebi-bytes is 1 gibi-byte.
People think in SI terms, but computers use binary terms. - prockcore, on 10/10/2007, -5/+11A GB is technically 1000 MB. SI created gibi/mebi/kibi to represent powers of two.
A kilometer isn't 1024 meters. Kilo means 1000, Mega means a million, giga means a billion. These are standard prefixes that have been corrupted by memory manufacturers, not harddrive manufacturers. 1 Gigabyte is 1 billion bytes. 1 Gibibyte is 1024 Mebibytes.
Your OS is the one who is reporting disk space incorrectly. - inactive, on 10/10/2007, -4/+10not in computer terms you moron. Computers have always been in multiples of 8 and that legacy should be continue. When a Ram manufacturer says one gig it means 1024 MB and not 1000MB Why the hell is it so painful for the hard drive mfgs to implement it. hell the difference at the most is giving the customer an extra 20 to 30 MB of space. is that too much to ask. it pisses the hell out of me when i have 3 of my partitions perfectly rounded off but the third one sticks out like a sore thumb with a not so rounded figure.
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