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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."

7 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 |deity| · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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.

      --
      Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
    2. 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. Gigi? Nah Gibi? Nah by l810c · · Score: 5, Funny
    How much Porn will it hold?

    This one will hold 30 days of Porn

    Now, this one here will hold 45 days of Porn

    Break it down to something Everyone understands

    1. Re:Gigi? Nah Gibi? Nah by darkov · · Score: 5, Funny

      Your idea is good, but it needs a unit since "days of porn" clumsy. I propose the "ejac" which is one days worth of porn. Larger units are derived using the usual base 10 system:

      decaejac
      kiloejac
      megaejac
      gigaejac ... and so on

      This is a handy unit since it can be converted into time (1 ejac = 20 minutes), liquid volume (1 ejac = 10cc), sound volume (1 ejac = 90dB) and distance (1 ejac = 75cm).

      If we all pull together, with this as our common goal, we can make the ejac a truly universal unit.

      --
      Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
  3. 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...

  4. 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.