Time for Hard Drive Manufacturers to Cut the GB BS
Posted by Dr. Macenstein
Let me ask you something.
If I were to sell you a dozen eggs, would you be OK with opening the carton and finding 9 eggs? If a car company were to put up a big sign advertising their new mini van had 100 cubic feet of cargo space, but it actually had about 75, do you think you would have the right to complain? Then why is it we all just accept the misleading way hard drive manufacturers advertise the amount of space on their drives?
What I am referring to is the long-standing, misleading practice hard drive manufacturers use to describe the available free space on their drives via binary math. This is by no means a new problem, but I feel it is is an issue that is becoming more and more relevant as drive sizes expand. For example, in the old days, you might have have a hard drive that was sold to you as 40GB, only to find that once installed, you really only have 37.22GB free. Nowadays, with drive capacities soaring, those 3 missing GB might not seem like a big deal, but as hard drive capacities get larger, so too does the the gap between what you read you were getting in your local computer catalog, and the actual specs provided when you do a “Get Info” on the drive once it’s in your Mac.
For example, 500GB hard drives are quite common these days. However, once you plug that drive into your Mac, you may be unpleasantly surprised to see you really only have 465GB available. Somehow between the store and your house, you lost about 35GB of space! I recently had the pleasure of reviewing a whopping 1Terabyte drive, and while it was thrilling to think I had close to 1000GB in the palm of my hand, I will admit it still annoyed me that what I REALLY had was more like 925GB in there. You may think, well, 925GB is more space than you’d ever need, but that is not the point (oh, and you’d be wrong. I filled that in a month). The point is, the difference between 1000GB and 925GB is 75GB. 75GB is nothing to dismiss lightly (it’s more than the largest iPod can actually hold), and I feel it is a big enough difference to warrant a change in advertising.
Now, before the geek squad begins flaming me about formatting issues, binary math and 1024’s and such, let me just say this. I understand that years ago the hard drive manufacturers got together and decided that consumers were too stupid to understand binary math, so they decided to start rounding off numbers (and in such a way that conveniently gave consumers an inflated perception of their drive’s capacity). My point is, they decided this back when drives topped out at around 5 or 10GB. I think that most consumers these days know what a decimal point is, and they could handle seeing a real world number listed below a hard drive in a catalog. I honestly would have no problem buying a Mac that listed its internal storage as 465.5GB.
Even if the potential differences in capacity that result from the different formatting methods somehow factor in to this intentionally misleading advertising gimmick, it’s not like there are 4000 different ways to format a drive. If manufacturers want to advertise a 500GB drive, then they should have to just put under it (in small writing, like all truth is written) list the actual capacities under the 3 major schemes, FAT32, NTFS, HFS+. And in reality, it’s not like a 500GB drive formatted with FAT32 is going to give you 499.99GB and as NTFS is going to give you 465GB. They are all pretty close, and all closer to 465GB than 500GB.
Change with the times
Where yesterday’s PC user was dealing with 2 kilobyte text files, today’s consumers are handling enormous photo, music, and video collections. Today’s PC user knows that an HD QuickTime movie trailer is 175MB. They understand that each shot from their 9 megapixel digital SLR camera is going to clock in around 5MB. They know a downloaded iTunes TV show takes up 600MB. They know these things, and they are conscious of the amount of free space they have available on their drives. There is no reason to tell them a 465.5GB drive is really a 500GB drive. I say hard drive manufacturers should take a page from the more honest flash media manufacturers, where a 1GB flash card delivers 1GB of storage.
I am not asking for drive manufacturers to adopt a more accessible “base ten” scheme instead of the current binary math used to calculate sizes. I am simply saying give us a little credit. We can handle seeing slightly odd capacity sizes. These ARE computers we’re talking about, remember. Most of us are geeks. We might actually like to tell a friend we have the new 74.5GB iPod.
August 3rd, 2007 at 12:10 am
I completely agree. I’ve had multiple conversations about this recently with friends and family members, and the consensus is that whichever way they decide to do it (actually sell us a 500GB formatted drive, or advertise the formatted capacity), the box should show the actual usable-after-formatted amount of space on the drive. I personally would prefer that they sell round-numbered capacities (500 formatted GB), and raise the prices a bit.
If a big brand begins to advertise drives by the real-life space, rather than the misleading 10-base counting, I will be a lot more likely to purchase their drives than another brand’s.
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:17 am
Um, this problem goes back long before 20 GB drives - we were experiencing it in the day of 20 MB and 40 MB drives.
On hard drives, there is no difference between preformatted and formatted capacity - that’s a distinction from the floppy drive era.
While I agree that drives should be rated in computer (binary) gigabytes, the difference is a very consistent 7-8% between advertised (digital) capacity and reported binary capacity. It’s no worse on a 700 GB drive than a 3 GB one.
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:24 am
Dan,
I was not trying to say that the problem is worse for larger drives. My point is just that 7% of a 1TB drive adds up to an insane amount of storage that you THINK you are buying, but in reality are not.
But everything is relative. 10 years ago 3GB of “missing” space would have seemed like the 90GB missing today.
-The Doc
August 3rd, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Why can’t HDD manufacturers simply make a drive that, after formatting, shows 500GB’s. If that means the drive is really 565GB’s unformatted, who cares. I think people like round numbers.
Look at sale prices. Yes, we have this sparkling new computer, all for just $4,999.99! Do they really think they are fooling people still? $5,000 is $5,000. Taking away a penny isn’t going to make it $4,000 magically. HDD makers are pretty much doing the opposite by quoting the base 10 value of bytes instead of the base 2 value.
I’ve always feel “jipped” when format a 500GB drive only to see 465GB. I want that 35GB! That’s quite a lot of music, or even movies.
August 3rd, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Lame, find a different topic someone who’s not a lamer will care about
August 3rd, 2007 at 2:32 pm
This issue bugs me quite a lot. The industry’s attempt to simplify things has just made things more complicated in the long run.
Dan Knight said: “the difference is a very consistent 7-8% between advertised (digital) capacity and reported binary capacity. It’s no worse on a 700 GB drive than a 3 GB one.”
While this amongst hard drives rated in GB, it doesn’t hold true for older hard drives rated in MB, or in newer drives rated in TB.
1MB=1,048,576B vs. 10^6 means a 4.6% difference
1GB=1,073,741,824B vs. 10^9 means a 7% difference
1TB=1,099,511,627,776 vs. 10^12 means a 9% difference
…and when we hit petabytes, then the difference grows to 11.2%
Why can’t the industry just tell us what we’re actually buying?
August 3rd, 2007 at 4:52 pm
Matt, that’s really interesting - so the problem does really become more serious as our drives grow. Specifically, as we jump from MB > GB > TB > PB.
August 3rd, 2007 at 5:21 pm
While you are at it, get rid of the 9/10th cent on gasoline prices. Might have mattered at 12cents a gallon, but not when you pay $3.50/gal.
Of course, that hasn’t happened. It is just part of the industry. And as each manufacturer doesn’t want to be outdone, you would have to have 100% participation. ’cause Seagate isn’t going to start advertising 465GB drives when Maxtor is selling 500GB drives.
Like the extinction of the 9/10th cent, I don’t think this will ever happen. But I would welcome it if it did.
August 3rd, 2007 at 5:49 pm
When I first read posts complaining about this on 1TB drives I snorted in disgust. My thoughts have changed since then and I agree, it’s time something was done about this. In the past 3 months I’ve filled up 2 1TB arrays and have more to come as I do video for a living. HD’s are cheap enough to be an economical way to archive and this holdover from days past should just be dealt with by quite easily upping the capacity a few more GB and selling them at rounded numbers. no BIG deal, but worth doing.
August 3rd, 2007 at 7:49 pm
Hard Drive manufacturers do not use binary math (2^x) to describe the size of hard drives, but rather they use decimal math (10^x). [If they used binary math to size a hard drive, we wonldn’t have this problem.] Please understand that I offer this only as gentle correction.
I do totally agree that it is time that hard drive manufacturers use the same binary system as the rest of the computer industry. I wouldn’t mind if they rated the drive size as the capacity of the drive before the filesystem (FAT/NTFS/HFS+) was applied — that would still be honest.
How is it that hard drive manufacturers can get away with using what amounts to the wrong measurement standard? If my local grocery store started using a different standard for their scales, the local government would be on them in no time. Why has [almost] nobody done anything yet?
August 3rd, 2007 at 10:27 pm
I love it when Macenstein breaches the great computing divide like this. My son was expressing the very same outrage over the capacity listing of his 360 Hard Drive the other day.
August 3rd, 2007 at 10:34 pm
This is an age old problem. It would be nice if they could finally get around to making a bit more cut and dry.
http://streetjesus.blogspot.com
August 3rd, 2007 at 10:39 pm
i agree …
and someone should do something about those internet connections as well …
i have a 512 … and i’ve never got anything close to it like ever …
August 3rd, 2007 at 10:43 pm
The iPod is a perfect example of this. When I had a 20 GB iPod, I actually had only 18.something and the 30GB follows the same pattern. Why not just post what is actually free, not the sum total before other programs are installed. Agree with this post 100%. Stop the bullshit.
August 3rd, 2007 at 10:57 pm
-I guess you could say I know a little about the hard drive business because that’s where I’m interning.-
Something that should be noted is the fact that the people who make these claims are the chiefs/vps of the companies and the marketing/sales teams. In the servo-mechanical department, as the aerial densities of the media rapidly decrease you better believe those drive capacities are on everyone’s mind, but for different reasons.
It’s easy to understand your frustration, but you probably don’t face the larger hard drive problems that the majority of users complain about. Power consumption, rugged durability, acoustics, drive speed, as well as drive capacity are the driving factors for demand, and when big time companies like Dell, HP, IBM, etc. want the business of hard drives (not to mention enterprise storage like Nearline), you can bet your hard earned dollar they care about delivering reliability over the actual literal drive capacity.
I like Dave M.’s idea and I’ve often wondered this myself. It’s kind of the same question as “why don’t marketplaces adjust their prices so that when you add tax it comes out evenly?” The same answer to that applies here. The “tax” changes over time (partition methods, file system optimization, compression & encryption to name a few) and that’s something you cannot escape with these rounded numbers.
Good conversation thus far…
August 3rd, 2007 at 10:57 pm
I think there are two solutions, one which you stated:
1)Put the actual formatted capacity on the box
2)If the manufacturers still want to keep even numbers, like 500gb, make sure that number is the formatted capacity
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:00 pm
automakers do this as well… mpg… *unless you draft behind an 18 wheeler with everything but the engine off on a downhill slope*
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:02 pm
This annoys me too. i don’t know if i am repeating someone, but it’s not about rounding KB, MB or GB, and it’s not simplifying things, and there is no unformated and formated size, it’s just beneficial for manufacturers to use decimal system instead of binary when describing how much bytes the hard drive holds because it looks bigger than it is, for example when you are buying 500GB disk, actually you are buying 500′000′000 (which is 500 G in decimal, but bytes are not decimal) bytes hard drive, which is 476,8… GB, the correct byte size that would make 500 GB should have been 524′288′000
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Funny story.
I actually bought a carton of eggs recently. I saw the dozen carton sitting on the shelf and thought to myself, “Steve, you have to buy those eggs.” To my horror, the carton only had 12 eggs in it. Being a baker, this is unacceptable. A dozen to me is 13, not 12. I demand anything I buy, in a dozen count, contain 13 items. I mean, it’s only fair. Right?
Who’s with me?!
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:07 pm
the problem isnt the HDD manufactures, its your ignorance. There is a difference between a GB and a GiB. Look it up on wikipedia for a full explanation, I’m not your professor. In short, 1 GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes, where 1 GiB is 1,073,741,824. The box is in GB, your computer tells it to you in GiB. There is a flat 98% difference between the two, so obviously, the bigger the hdd, the bigger the difference from GB to GiB.
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:07 pm
so you complain about 5 gigs when you run an operating system thats 25 gigs because it has every print driver under the sun…..hmmm hard drives are cheap who cares
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:09 pm
The fact of the matter is, the hard drive manufacturers are absolutely correct in the units they use. They’re following the SI prefix, which is base 10. 10^3 - kilo, 10^6 - mega, 10^9, giga etc. For a long time there was a word of mouth saying that if on computers the SI prefix had a double meaning.. That it was 2^10 - kilo, 2^20 - mega, 2^30 - giga etc. Whenever you give a unit a double meaning you run into problems, so a new standard was created by the IEC.
This works on binary, so 2^10 - kibi, 2^20 - mebi, 2^30 - gibi. The issue is still around because many operating systems have not changed over to this new standard, as they bloody well should have. They’re calculating binary prefixes but using the SI symbols to represent the IEC values.
If hdd manufacturers posted both, then sure.. 300GB and 279GiB respectively. They can post one or the other, but they have to use the correct symbols associated with the correct standard.
You can take a look on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix for more information. If you want to complain to anyone, complain to the operating systems for using the wrong symbols for the type of measurement they’re doing. It’s completely their fault.
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Giga means 1 billion. 10 gigabytes means 1 billion bytes. You’re confusing it with “Gibi”
In other words, harddrive manufacturers are correct, you and your operating system are wrong.
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:12 pm
It’s hardly misleading advertising- it’s consistent across the industry and completely predictable; given the manufacturer’s listed size you can calculate fairly accurately the “actual” size you’ll see.
You not wanting to bother to do the math if it concerns you that much isn’t really sufficient reason by itself.
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:13 pm
This is because HD manufacturers say 1 KB = 1000 B, 1 MB = 1000 KB, 1 GB = 1000 MB, and 1 TB = 1000 GB. The conversion factors are really 1024. A 500 GB hard drive is actually 500,000,000,000 B, but it should really be 536,870,923,000 B, so you always lose 6.87% (on drives quoted in GB, less in MB, more in TB).
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:14 pm
All it would take is one company to make a “true” line or something similar that would show the actual, formatted size of the drive. They’d probably through in some other gimmick to make it a little more marketable, but I bet you if one company would just release one line of drives that showed the actual size, the others would follow suit and we’d eventually get to a point where there is no special line; all HDD’s show their true capacity.
An unlikely future, but a guy can dream, right?
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:15 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
Up here in Canada, we have a meter and kilometer. A kilometer is 1,000 meters, not 1,024 meters. So if I have a byte and a kilobyte, a kilobyte should be 1,000 bytes, right? Then, a gigabye would be 1,000,000,000 bytes and so on.
If you read the above article, you’ll find that in “1998, the IEC, then the IEEE has normalized a new model describing binary prefixes avoiding consumer confusion.” So really, what’s going on here is that the drive manufacturers are in the right calling the drive 500GB. Your OS should be calling it 465GiB. Two different units.
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:15 pm
Sean,
To say all the consumers computer operating system makers are wrong is ridiculous. Who are the hard drive makers designing drives for if not them?
that’s like auto manufacturers advertising their cars get 40 hectares to the liter of kerosene (to quote the Simpsons) when roads are measured using miles.
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:15 pm
Just to let you know the reason that there is less hard drive space is because of two things. One, the operating system uses about 1Gb of hard drive depending on the size of it, no matter if it’s Vista, or Ubuntu, you’re going to lose hard drive space. Two, You have to realize that hard drive space is depended on the partition program that you use. For example, if you run Windows XP you hard drive that is 1000TB will turn to 925TB because the program takes out 7% of the hard drive space for hard drive buffering which is very important. It might be 35Gb that you’re wasting, but most of it goes to buffering.
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:16 pm
Who really cares? Everybody knows that this is how it works. We know that our 500gb drive isn’t going to hold 500gb of data. Making manufacturers publish different numbers is just going to tell us what we already know.
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:27 pm
A good way to implement the idea for hard drive manufacturers would simply be to switch to the new binary prefix standardized by the IEEE. This way the distinction would be made clear for consumers. For example, with the SI prefix, you have a GB which is 1,000,000,000 or 10^9 bytes, with binary prefix you have a GiB which is 1024×1024x1024 or 2^30 bytes. Btw, this also means that currently, they are not doing false advertising, they are really giving you 100GB when they label it as such, which is 100,000,000,000 bytes and not 100*1024*1024*1024.
They would simply advertise in GiB and make it clear.
For more details see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:34 pm
The guy speaking about his internet connection being 512, that’s not 512 kilobytes per second, but 512 kilobits per second, which is probably stated everywhere in your ISP service. It’s really not anyone’s fault that different parts of the industry uses different measuring sticks. On the box of all the hard drives I’ve bought it says “1 gig = 1,000,000,000 bytes”
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:36 pm
It’s not the binary math, nor is it malicious on their part. It’s to do with how hard drives are made.
Hard drives have extremely high engineering tolerances and the slightest ripple in the surface of the disk will make that part of the drive unusable - make a bad sector, in fact. The tolerances are so high that you simply cannot get a perfect, 100% smooth hard drive on which you can use the entire disc surface.
So what they do is make hard drives 10% bigger, knowing that they will lose some space to the imperfect surfaces of the discs. On average, they lose 10% of their space to bad sectors. Some go as high as 20%.
So when you buy a hard drive, it’s +/- 10%.
And, of course, the cheaper drives are those which are nearly -10%.
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:37 pm
Well said! It’s annoying how its a common practice and while the uninformed consumer may be pissed off, the computer clerks just scoff at it as if its something to be expected. I’ve always thought this was a stupid pratice, but it hasn’t been until recent times where they are selling hard drives that are 100+gb that you really start to lose out on a serious chunk of hd space. 32gb is nothing small, that’s not just “rounding” that’s hd company stealing.
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:48 pm
The whole kibi-, mebi- and gibi- prefixes are a bad solution to a problem which shouldn’t have even existed. In the context of computers, there is no reason why kilo-, mega- and giga- cannot represent a base of 2.
In every other aspect of the industry, 1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes. Every single aspect. Even with ISP’s where they would have something to gain by using base 10, 1 kilobit/s = 128 Bytes/s, not 100 Bytes/s.
The new *bi- prefixes should just be avoided. It’s going the wrong direction to a problem that will eventually just solve itself (that is, HDD manufacturers will begin to put base-2 byte values, or be replaced by flash manufacturers)
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:51 pm
The hard drive manufactures make it publicly known that they publish their capacities in base10. It’s not a secret. They’ve ALWAYS done it that way. If you believe in the metric system, you would probably prefer that everything be base10-derived, including computer capacities.
Why’s it such a big deal to accept that hard drive capacity is marketed differently than what the operating system on your computer may display the capacity as?
The “df” command has the option to display capacity in base10 or base2, as do other utilities.
August 4th, 2007 at 12:00 am
This is a pretty late argument in the game. Hard drives as we know them will be obsolete in less than three years.
August 4th, 2007 at 12:06 am
The hard drive manufacturers are giving the real capacity of the hard drive. The SI standards say that a gigabyte is 1000 megabytes - but that’s already been explained in detail by ryan with his excellent post.
I wanted to touch on the “$4999.99 rather than $5000″ issue. The real reason that originally happened is because when cash registers first started being used, cashiers were just putting round figure cash amounts into the register without actually running the numbers on the register, meaning that the totals from the register at the end of the day/shift were wrong. They knocked a penny off the price in order to force the cashier to put the payment through the register in order to give change. This meant more accurate counts through the register and less cashiers dipping their hands into the company’s cash. Now it’s just part of our culture.
August 4th, 2007 at 12:09 am
@Brian:
Your post is completely wrong. We’re talking about formatted capacity, which means while the drive is blank with just the filesystem on it. 7% of the drive is not reserved for “hard drive buffering” - the drives have a small amount on NVRAM on the circuit board for buffering, most operating systems use some system RAM for it too.
August 4th, 2007 at 12:16 am
I notice you went with the cargo capacity in you automotive analogy. Perhaps mileage would have been a better example. As in no one gets the milage promised by their automaker either.
The strong point of your argument is that a 64GB flash drive is not the same as a 64GB hard drive. You’d think we would have one standard for storage devices.
August 4th, 2007 at 12:16 am
Yep. I agree. Like buying 20 gallons of gas, paying for it, but the pump only delivers 18.5 gallons. Or like getting 1.00 worth of gas, but having to pay 3.00 for it because of an entire industry price fixing their way to record multi billion dollar profits….
August 4th, 2007 at 12:19 am
>They’re following the SI prefix.
> If you want to complain to anyone, complain to the operating systems for using the wrong symbols
> So really, what’s going on here is that the drive manufacturers are in the right calling the drive 500GB. Your OS should be calling it 465GiB
I guess that was sarcasm, but just for the sake of the argument I do want to answer that.
When one stupid doc (however “standard” or “international”) says one thing, and absolutely all and every single device that plays with those figures, which are totally omnipresent in our everyday life, use another agreed upon scale, it is that one is correct and the other is bullshit, and it is easy to spot which one it is.
This “1GB as in 1.000.000 KB” is the most stupid thing I have ever read. How about adding a sticker that reads “1GB as in 237 KB”? That would give us all even bigger hard drives and make everybody happie, uh?
August 4th, 2007 at 12:29 am
Tim, what you are asking is for the mangling of the base 2 system.
for fun, convert 1024 DEC to BIN (base 10 to base 2). I think it will clear things up quite a bit for you. Look to thinks from their core, not the consumer facade.
August 4th, 2007 at 12:34 am
you know, TAKE IT TO COURT!!!!!!!! i bet you would win, it is “false advertising”
August 4th, 2007 at 12:35 am
FYI, Megabit and gigabit mean 1 million bits and 1 billion bits respectively.
August 4th, 2007 at 12:38 am
Brian, you’re wrong. See earlier explanations about Giga vs. Gibi for the real reason HDD’s are “so much smaller than advertised.” This is not to say that the OS and page-file don’t take up any space at all, but they really have nothing to do with the point of this article. I suppose it doesn’t help that the author of the article seems ignorant of the facts laid out in the comments section regarding the SI prefix issue, brushing them off in the article as if they are meaningless.
In short, Brian, those things matter somewhat, but they don’t explain the “missing space,” especially when it comes to external hard drives which contain no OS or page file.
August 4th, 2007 at 12:41 am
Rowlings,
What are the OS makers designing software for if not for being put on hard drives?
Really, all the software manufacturers have done is understated just how much space their files take up. That may have been their coy plan back when storage was expensive.
SI exists for a reason. Its time for software to obey it.
August 4th, 2007 at 12:43 am
It’s impossible for the manufacturer to specify a “formatted” amount, since different filesystems have different amounts of overheard. Should they list the NTFS amount? What about FAT32? HPFS for Macs? Macs are supposed to be getting ZFS soon. Linux natively runs Ext2, Ext3, Reiser, Reiser4, XFS, and JFS with more if you look for them.
Additionally, it’s important to note that traditionally, Unix-style filesystems will reserve 5% of the disk for root-only, so that when a user maxes out the drive, there’s still room for root to go in and get things done. Linux does this by default and I assume Mac OSX aswell. You might want to poke around at the filesystem options, you may find another 5% you never knew you had. In linux, the program is “tune2fs”. I assume there’s something similar for macs.
August 4th, 2007 at 1:05 am
Ummmm I have a friend sitting in a s*&t hole somewhere in Iraq on his second tour. PLEASE DON”T START on the war, the president, etc… I am just trying to make point. AND I know it was his choice to join the military.
But don’t you think we have BIGGER things to worry about than this. I am an “IT Professional”, Geek, gamer, etc… I could give a rats a$$ about this issue and any side job I have ever had to explain this was easy.
“Unfortunately in order for the drive to keep track of the information, it needs a percentage of the drive for itself.” That is not ENTIRELY true but its close enough for someone who doesn’t understand and wants a quick answer!
Now can we please move on to something else.
August 4th, 2007 at 1:21 am
I recently bought a Maxtor 300GB drive at Office Depot and took noticed that the box actually said the drive inside the box was a 320GB model instead of the 300gb…
The 320 still formatted to about 299GB i think, but at least Maxtor ’seemed’ to understand…
August 4th, 2007 at 1:39 am
It’s a long standing disagreement between CS+ECE people EE+Physics people. Fact is, that while it’s convenient to count in binary in CS and ECE, it’s confusing to people if the terms for the powers are the same terms used in base 10 counting by EE and Physics people.
Think of it this way, that 500GB hard drive has 500,000,000,000 bytes. Each byte is 8 bits, but to store 8 bits you need parity bits and ecc bits, so when they sell you a 500GB HD they’re selling one with 625GB on it, of which only 500GB can be used for user data. When the operating system uses it, it tells you whatever it feels like telling you. Fact is, you still have 500GB at your disposal regardless of what the OS says. Granted if they OS says you have 500 you really have more than that in actual GB.
August 4th, 2007 at 1:45 am
Please don’t format a 500GB drive with FAT32. In fact don’t bother to go beyond MS’s 32 GiB limit. You wouldn’t be able to make any files larger that 4 GiB.
August 4th, 2007 at 1:45 am
Brady, there are plenty of people who don’t know / haven’t accepted this fact.
A rather computer-illiterate friend of mine phoned Dell tech support a few years ago, angry that his hard drive wasn’t as large as advertised.
August 4th, 2007 at 1:57 am
The point is not if hard drive manufacturers are right or wrong in using the SI prefixes. What’s important is that, to this day people get confused by it. And hard drive manufacturers know this damn well, yet refuse to do anything about it. And there’s technically nothing stoping them from just fucking printing both - GiB and GB(base10) numbers - onto the hdd cartons.
They don’t do this to uphold international standard measurement units. They do it for fraudulent reasons - from the wrong believe that tricking customers helps their bottom line.
August 4th, 2007 at 2:25 am
Hey guys, sorry about my other posts. I’m a retard.
August 4th, 2007 at 2:39 am
The SI prefixes have been defined for almost a century and are available at http://www.bipm.org/en/si/si_brochure/chapter3/prefixes.html Notice that kilo is defined to be 10^3, mega is defined to be 10^6, etc. This is the standard.
The confusion is due to the fact that the computer world decided to use the same prefix names for 2^10, 2^20, etc., basically violating the SI standards. In order to alleviate this confusion, since November 2000, the IEC has defined prefixes for binary multiples http://www.iec.ch/zone/si/si_bytes.htm Now 2^10 is kibi, 2^20 is mibi, etc.
So 1 G = 10^9 and 1 Gi = 2^30. If HDD manufactures use the powers of 10 system, they are adhering to the standard!
August 4th, 2007 at 2:51 am
Understand that a disk is not just a filing cabinet where you store your files, it is just a long stream of bits that may be in order or maybe not. In order for it to be used effectively by an Operating System, there needs to be a way to understand where a file starts, where it stops, where its various blocks are, how much free space you have, file attributes, etc…so it has to function more like a database:
Here is a quickie on the ext2 file-system
http://tldp.org/LDP/tlk/fs/filesystem.html
Your “missing disk space” is (aside from GB GiBi math) actually on the disk; it is being used to actually index your data so you can find it again.
August 4th, 2007 at 3:49 am
“Seagate isn’t going to start advertising 465GB drives when Maxtor is selling 500GB drives.”
Seagate owns Maxtor silly.
August 4th, 2007 at 4:21 am
Brian, give up now you have no idea how a hdd works stop spouting your nonsensical drivel on a completely non related topic ‘tard
August 4th, 2007 at 6:11 am
When you buy a house, I am from Spain, you can see two diferents sizes, per example:
Constructed area: 100 m2
Profitable area: 85m2
It is real that the house has one hundred square meters BEFORE adding the walls but the surface you are going to use is eighty five square meters.
Hard drives manufacturers needs to switch to this way: Total size an profitable size.
August 4th, 2007 at 6:40 am
Wow. Some of the disinformation here is amazing. First of all, the operating system sets aside what’s known as “swap space”, a partition manually configurable on most Linux installers, that is usually about twice the size of the amount of RAM you have installed. This can vary, and I don’t remember what Windows uses exactly, but it surely will not be 7% of a TB drive. Also, partition information is stored on the hard drive, but again, the amount of space devoted to this is minimal. The difference in the published size (in base 10) and the actual size (in base 2) is largely due to, in my opinion, lazy engineers (I would know, being one myself), and NOT due to the partitioning program or operating system you use. To represent the decimal number 1000 in binary would be 0×01111101000, whereas the decimal number 1024, being a power of 2, simply is 0×10000000000. Engineers are notorious for bad estimation/rounding, and 1024 bytes became a kilobyte because it makes the math easier.
Also, if you look on the box of any new hard drive it will specifically state the actual number of bytes. I don’t think that the argument can be made that the interpretation of the product should effect the manufacturing specification. It would cause much more confusion to change the established specification than to keep it.
As a final thought, why is this even an issue? Hard drive prices have dropped so significantly in recent times that if, in fact, you really need that extra 7% that you claim was stolen from you by the evil hard drive manufacturers, go buy another drive. Your performance will be better anyway if your drives aren’t full to the brim.
August 4th, 2007 at 7:04 am
Umm.. I recently bought a 160 GB drive. But when I plugged it in, it showed available space of only 150GB. I felt cheated.
August 4th, 2007 at 7:14 am
Brady, not everyone knows how it works, that’s how you sucker people into great deals. There are quite a few computer users out there that barely know what the term “keyboard” is, much less GB vrs. GiB. (Who came up with this ridiculous name anyway? GibiByte? It sounds like someone with a speech impediment!) Sure, “we” know what is going on, but “we” are a special breed of people that geek out on stuff like this. Normal folk don’t understand all these terms and barely understand what a byte is and really don’t care.
OK, after digging through the Wikipedia stuff, I can see what is going on here. The SI folks were unhappy about the computer community using metric terms for binary values. It would be like saying 1000 miles is a KiloMile or KM. I can see where they are coming from since they want to keep things simple and in base 10 units.
I suppose it all started with frequency values. When computers were rated at 2 KHz or KiloHertz, they figured that measuring the about of memory in a computer would also be good with Kilo and Mega.
So my computers 2GB’s of memory is really a 2.147483648GB computer? That’s not going to fly with computer manufacturers. I supposed they could say 2GiB’s, but when they have to say GibiBytes, people are going to laugh at them. If the IEC wanted to come up with a new standard that describes binary multiples better, they had better come up with something that does sound like a 6 month old is trying to say it.
August 4th, 2007 at 7:51 am
Wow. Human stupidity and ignorance is really limitless. Get over it, stupid: 1 Gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes. This can be looked up in the standards, so you will probably loose if you go to court. Get a life!
August 4th, 2007 at 8:12 am
All I have to say is I am looking at the top of an old (4gb) seagate hard drive right now and it says it’s binary capacity right on the sticker, I think that it is the retailers that are benefiting from this deception more than the manufacturers, as every hdd I have ever bought has had the binary capacity printed on the sticker (if it had a capacity written on it at all)
August 4th, 2007 at 8:27 am
Waide, printed on the sticker (likely extremely small) on the drive is different than the GIANT number advertised on the outside of the box, or in a catalog.
Sure, geeks know what is going on, but 99% of the world doesn’t. Remember, there are people who have not heard of an iPod. Scary, but true.
August 4th, 2007 at 8:55 am
you’re totally right. this has annoyed me since forever too and i’ve always been baffled at how they can just get away with it. i think it’s simply because most people don’t understand it.
August 4th, 2007 at 9:05 am
The manufacturers are correct.
Kilo = 10^3x
Mega = 10^6x
Giga = 10^9x
Tera = 10^12x
That’s why, if you’re going to be accurate you take about kibi, mebi, gibi and teri bytes. which are 2^10, 2^20, 2^30, 2^40 respectively.
I’m not saying it’s not misleading but they are correct.
August 4th, 2007 at 9:10 am
If my OS tells me a file is 240kb on disk (245,760 bytes), then 240k means some 246,000 bytes. it makes no sense for a hard drive manufacturer to come and offer me a drive that’s 100,000,000,000 bytes and label it as 100gig. CDs are not 681Meg and 734Meg, but DVDs are 4.7G and not the 4.3 they are. A Gig of ram is 1024megs.. I hate this inconsistency of units. I’d be happy if the OS told me a file is 246kb on disk and that I have 3G space left instead of 2.8. Or I’d be happy to have my harddrive equal 100G if it’s labeled as such. Just fsckin decide on units already, ok?
August 4th, 2007 at 9:25 am
technically its not misleading … mega, giga are base 10 meaurements, with the use of binary in computers they have always been used, but they have always been names used because they were close. mega means a million, when talking about a computers its just been implied that it was 2^30 BUT the term mega means 10^6 always has, always will. WHEN SOMEONE TALKING ABOUT COMPUTERS SAYS MEGA THEY IMPLICITLY MEAN MEBI … hardware manufacturers are correct, get over it. you know what it means, forget about it.
anyone getting worked up about this is slightly retarded.
August 4th, 2007 at 9:26 am
george, read matts comment
August 4th, 2007 at 10:18 am
Brian, you’re a moron. Get a clue. We’re talking about drive capacity, not drive usage, both of which are plainly visible in any operating system. Go back to playing Halo you paint huffer.
August 4th, 2007 at 11:44 am
Idiots, formated capacity varies depending on the use. UFS2 vs FAT32 vs NTFS vs HFS ect ect.
Get a freaking clue, go find a cause that sounds plausible till you count on reality.
August 4th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
I bought a Hitachi 80GB once but it actually had 82GB of space, so i was alright, but i wonder why??????
August 4th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Um a few problems here with your article. The hard drive manufacturers DO USE BASE 10, but free space is displayed Windows and MacOS etc in base2 (’binary math’.) So a 500 GB (500 BILLION BYTE) drive appears as 465 or something. ie what seagate call a ‘GB’ (correct SI units) and what idiot anal retentive programmers call a ‘GB’ is different.
If the OS used base10, then it would say 500GB and you wouldn’t even be wasting your time on such a useless article. Windows can count space any way it likes, it could use units of CHICKENS and you would be like HEY where are my missing chickens??
How this got on front page of Digg is beyond me.
August 4th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
I for one would like to see this changed to reflect what space is actually available.
I am curious, though - I wonder what the differences are (in available space) between the various formats are like.
August 4th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Ok, here’s a solution. If they can sell me a 500GB drive with the legend (1GB=1,000,000,000 bytes), then I should be able to buy it with dollars labeled ($1=107.4 cents).
August 4th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Who cares? Its a labeling issue morons
August 4th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
run fdisk on your drive… it will tell you the “rounded” numbers for your drive size. it all has to do with the layout of a hard disk and the way it is formatted. the numbers that are on the box have been correct for me according to fdisk every time. when i pull the drives up in linux or windows the sizes are usually much different.
want another example? create a virtual machine with a drive size of your choosing, the virtual os will not see the entire amount of space free (as previously mentioned by the differences in formatting plus partition tables and mbr’s).
hd manufacturers give the number they do because it is the only way to dependably give you data about the drive. there are too many file systems out there for them to name the capacity under each one. You purchase a drive for the hardware, the manufacturers do not really care what you do with them after that. They give you hardware specs, thats all.
August 4th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
I found this extreemly annoying when I bought a Zip Drive and found that the more I stored the smaller the disk got and for 100 meg on a zip disk, I got some times as little as 60 megs of actual storage.