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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."

3 of 482 comments (clear)

  1. Does it matter anymore? by Dancin_Santa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    With storage prices falling through the floor, does it matter to anyone except whiny nerds whether the byte counts are done in base 10 or base 2?

    In the words of William Shatner, "Get a life!"

    1. Re:Does it matter anymore? by ergo98 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "In reality it seems that they want to sell product with decimal G capacities but have customers believe they are buying disk with conventionally calculated capacity and hoping that no one would notice."

      This is all so absolutely ridiculous. Firstly, about 99% of people on the streets, including most computer users, aren't mentally calculating the power of 2 capacities when you say that a hard-drive has 40GB, or a memory module has 512MB -- Instead they mentally have an awareness that 40GB is "big, but 80GB is better", and "512MB is good". I highly doubt they're going to get their shiney new drive, and DRATS! - they have 42949672960 of virus filled emails to fit in there, but instead they only got 40000000000.

      Secondly, hard drive manufacturers, as a general rule, have used the power of 10 rule since before I first became interested in computers about 18 years ago - this is the standard, and if you haven't read the byline "GB refers to 1,000,000,000 bytes" then you just haven't been looking.

      This whole campaign is just contrived and attention seeking nonsense. I suspect that someone just finished their "Computers 101" course, and they think they've discovered an amazing fraud being perpetrated upon the public by those dastardly harddrive manufacturers.

  2. WTF? by MarvinIsANerd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is not a matter of base-10 vs base-2... a base-10 number is written as "2875" for example. A base-2 number is written as "10100110". A base-16 number is written as "8A3F0"...

    This is a matter of UNITS used - like inches vs. feet, or in this case GiB vs GB.

    Geez, get the terminiology right...