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Hard Drive Capacity Confusion, Lucidly Explained

Posted by timothy on from the fudging-the-numbers dept.

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."

1 of 482 comments (clear)

  1. 6 pages?! by TwistedGreen · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.