Hard Drive Capacity Confusion, Lucidly Explained

mrklin writes "James Wiebe of wiebetech.com has written a clear example of how hard drive capacity is calculated (PDF file) by hard drive manufacturers (base 10) and OS (base 2). He failed to name how the capacity should be described, though."

Comments

6 pages?!

[TwistedGreen]

The 6 pages of the article, summarized in three lines:

Hard drive manufacturers measure capacity in multiples of 1,000,000,000 (10^9) Bytes.
Operating systems measure capacity in multiples of 1,073,741,824 (2^30) Bytes.
Some people get confused because they both call it a gigabyte.

I really don't think this is such a big deal. OSes are started to specify the proper GiB instead of GB, so there shouldn't be a problem anymore.

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[dtfinch]

I'm a whiny nerd, and it doesn't matter much to me whether hard disk manufactures define sizes in multiples of base 10 or base 1010.

But I want to know how each drive handles error correction. A sector isn't REALLY 100000000 bytes when stored on disk, but has extra information to help it detect and correct most small errors. Some manufacturer could skimp on the error correction to increase storage capacity or reduce cost, but the drive would likely crap out sooner than others on the market.

Re:Ditch binary units

[Monkelectric]

Huh? no reason to use binary units? What are you smoking and can I have some? :)

The reason we use binary units is for engineering reasons ... Back in the way back time there was no such thing as a disk drive, and there was only ram. Ram had/has to be made in a power of two because it has to completley fill its address space so the NEXT ram chip begins where the other ends. Otherwise you'd have holes in your address space.