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

Re:Does it matter anymore?

[|deity|]

Even the article states that you are losing 10% of the capacity you would expect. I think 10% is significant enough to complain about.

The author at one point in the article says that operating systems have historically not documented how size is counted. Like the engineers at a drive manufacturing company aren't smart enough to know that if you calculate a kilobyte in base 2 you are going to calculate a megabyte, or gigabyte in base 2.

Yes if you are smarter then your average computer user, which is to say smarter then a really dumb rock you should know that what's reported on a drive is not the actuall size.

It still hacks me off. It's like a soda manufacturer deciding it's ok to redefine an ounce so that they can claim that their drink is larger then it is or just use a smaller container and claim it's still the same size.

Does it matter, yes and it will matter more as storage capacity increases.

If you use a computer it does all calculations in binary, it only makes sense for the capacity of the drive to be calculated in binary.