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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hey guys, sorry about my other posts. I’m a retard.
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!
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.
“Seagate isn’t going to start advertising 465GB drives when Maxtor is selling 500GB drives.”
Seagate owns Maxtor silly.
Brian, give up now you have no idea how a hdd works stop spouting your nonsensical drivel on a completely non related topic ‘tard
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.
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 0x01111101000, whereas the decimal number 1024, being a power of 2, simply is 0x10000000000. 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.
Umm.. I recently bought a 160 GB drive. But when I plugged it in, it showed available space of only 150GB. I felt cheated.
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.
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!
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
george, read matts comment
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.
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.
I bought a Hitachi 80GB once but it actually had 82GB of space, so i was alright, but i wonder why??????
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.
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.
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). 😉
Who cares? Its a labeling issue morons
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.
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.
Just do you know. HFS+ isn’t really in the top 3 of format ways. Maybe for the consumer, but not in the real world. ext2/3 is much higher.
So what is with some of these comments here. If you can’t be civil in your comment, I suggest not commenting. There is no need to call someone a name to drive your point home. If your point has merit, it won’t need any other aid other than the point itself.
Reading these comments, I learned a lot about this new standard that was developed back in ’99 and why. I wasn’t aware of it before. I just wish the committee had come up with better names than kibi, mebi and gibi. They just don’t sound good and computer manufacturers are not going to embrace a new standard that puts their product in a bad light of any kind.
This is a simple misunderstanding, hard drive companies are not doing any thing wrong. Manufacturers put out numbers based on the premise that a Gigabyte is 1000 Megabytes. However operating systems run on the premise that a Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes. So you are not losing any space its just allocated differently.
It is like if you called a dozen 12 but the store called 24 a dozen. If you buy 24 eggs you still have 24 eggs whether you call it one dozen or two dozen, it is just a name.
Three cheers for David’s post up above.
The average consumer sees a megabyte as one million bytes, and a gigabyte as one billion bytes. That some get confused by the disparity between the base-10 count in advertisements and the base-2 count done by an operating system is not the fault of the hard drive manufacturer.
i recently bought a maxtor 300 gb drive and they put an extra 20 gb to solve the problem with formatting
What you’re asking for is nonsensical: There are far too many variables for drive manufacturers to be able to tell you how much data you’ll really be able to put on the drive. What filesystem(s) will you be putting on the drive (NTFS, FAT16, FAT32, EXT2, EXT3, HPFS, JFS, ReiserFS)? Will you be using any special partitions (swap, hibernate)? Will you be using any sort of logical volume management? RAID? What kind of files will you be putting on the system (if you use a lot of little files, you lose space to “sector overhang”)?
It makes far more sense for them to simply say “Here’s the raw amount of space you’re going to get. Oh, and by the way, 1GB = a billion bytes.” Every drive I’ve bought for the last quite a few years has had that statement quite clearly written on the outside of the packaging. And since they always round down in the advertising, every drive I’ve bought for the last quite a few years has also technically had more space than advertised.
If you want to be an anal-retentive twit, go look up the freaking drive specs yourself to figure out exactly how many bytes the drive has before you buy it.
There have been a lot of very informative comments on this post, especially those pointing out that the HDD manufacturers are very correct in their numbering of GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes. I strongly support the idea of standards, so I appreciate the idea of the GiB standard. However, this was never about who was right and who was wrong. This is about the consumer.
I understand very well the different factors that come into this issue – base 2/base 10, SI measurements, etc. – but I honestly could care less who is right in their numbering, what needs to change, etc. The article was written from a consumer standpoint, and I, not being in the HDD storage industry, am looking at the issue from a consumer standpoint.
From a consumer’s point of view, when they see “500GB” (or “500GiB”, but I’ll use GB for example) on a box they need to be able to go home, install the drive and see 500GB of formatted space on their monitor. They need to have 500GB to use. It must be consistent. For a consumer, the technical aspects of how that consistency came about do not matter. Even if it means they are getting slightly less space because it is measured in GB instead of GiB.
I suppose I should not that one technical limitation of this consistency is that different file-systems differ slightly in their formatting. If someone buys a 500GB drive and gets only 499.9xGB because of their file-system’s formatting method, you might say that the consistency is lost. No one is petty enough to complain about 100MB lost in formatting. A good industry standard would be an allowable 1GB fluctuation to account for issues such as formatting.
The number of GB or TB must be consistent from box to drive to formatting to OS, regardless of the technical means and allowing for slight fluctuations in formatting.
The amount of a harddrive is actually 40gigs… or at least extremly close to this.
The number that is missing from your hard drive is actually what is UNAVAILABLE! Not simply not there. Go into your settings, if you are using windows and have not changed anything you’ll have more than 5gigs set up for the amount thats set aside for system restore info as they automatically hold normally 3 months back.
This and amount of space reserved for recyling bin and such easily adds up almost to the 40 gigs that are adverticed (39.4gigs on my 40 gig hard drive, my 80 gig having more than 78)
I’m pretty sure that either the hard drive manufacturers are violating federal regulations, or the software publishers are using outdated calculations. If it’s the latter, there’s not much to do, especially since everything software does is binary, and you can’t change that.
On the other hand, there is the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers(IEEE), and American National Standards Institute. All of these groups have established standard measurement of a byte, megabyte, gigabyte, etc. Unfortunately, there are two definitions of these standards. One is for data storage (scaled at 1024) and one for data transfer (scaled at 1000). Even though they disk makers know the difference (and know that even neophyte users expect a 100GB drive to read as 100GB on their computer), and may be technically defensible, they’re being deliberately misleading.
One of two things has to happen: either these groups establish clearly defined limitations of which definition is appropriate, or if that’s already been done the hard drive manufacturers should be charged with deceptive practices by the FTC.
i agree, but in actual mathematical terms, Mega is 10 to the power of 6 and giga is ten power 9, so they also have a valid reason to do this.
I just realized two mistakes of mine…and since we’re on topic of telling the truth:
Aerial should be areal as in area (thanks Tom), and those areal densities are INCREASING!!
In one inch extending from the center of a platter these days, there are more than 160,000 tracks and counting.
Two corrections:
Aerial –> Areal (like area, thanks Tom)
Areal densities are INCREASING.
In one inch extending from the disc center to the outer radius, there are more than 160,000 data tracks and counting.
I hate it when morons like you have access to other people…
To qoute:
“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?”
12 eggs promised. 9 eggs received. HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM!!!
100 cubic feet promised. 75 cubic feet received. HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM!!!
500 GB disk space cubic promised. 465 GB disk space cubic received. HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM!!!
But, unlike your 2 MORONIC examples, you ACTUALLY GET 500 GB disk space. As promised. It’s like opening a carton with a dozen eggs, and finding a dozen eggs!!! Or advertising a new mini van with 100 cubic feet of cargo space, but it actually had 100 cubic feet of cargo space!!!
Similar with your other MORONIC examples… Your MAC HAS 500 GB. Not 465.5…
It’s just that your brain can’t comprehend a small calculation to convert, it seems…
But, OK, if you really want it that way, rename a GB to something else. Call it a DFB (dumb-füçk byte), which equates to 0.xxx GB. So, when you refer to 500 DFB, you get 500 DFB.
But the fact remains, you still get 500 GB, which equates to
Ugh… List interest halfway through…
I have an easy solution – overfill the drive so that it has 1TB when you format it. So if a 1 TB drive is 965 GB, then make a 1.5 TB drive and sell it as a 1 TB drive so that you get what it says on the box!
RE: DAN KNIGHT:
“On hard drives, there is no difference between preformatted and formatted capacity – that’s a distinction from the floppy drive era.”
No, there is no difference between pre- and post- formatted capacity, however, in each case you should be receiving EXACTLY the amount of capacity that you are told you are buying!
RE: DAN KNIGHT::
“… 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.”
You missed the point. Yes, 7 to 8 percent is the same percentage loss for any size drive, however, the absolute amount of loss INCREASES with drive size. For example, If you bought a candy bar for $1 and received 7% less candy, that is a loss of only 7 cents. But, if you bought a house for a million dollars, which is very easy to do on the east and west coasts of the U.S., receiving 7% less house is a loss of $70,000 dollars!
A poor person might not care about a loss of 7 cents on a candy bar. A wealthy person WOULD care VERY MUCH about losing $70,000 of value on a house!
So, as the hard drives become bigger, the ABSOLUTE size of the loss becomes larger.
How would you like to be hired at a company at $100,000 a year salary, yet be given only $93,000 (7% less salary) in wages during the year, because the company “has a agreement with the rest of its industry” that it defines $100,000 to be worth only $70,000?
The hard drive industry has been misleading consumers for too long, and the government should have stepped in a long time ago.
If I sold you a dozen eggs, you smashed 3 of them and then complained that there were only 9, I’d be irritated with _you_.
If I advertised a minivan w/100 ft^3 of space and you put 40 ft^3 of boxes into it and then complained that you couldn’t fit your entire fat family in there, I would laugh.
Did you know that your 1 Gb/s ethernet port will never give you a full 1 Gb/s of OS-level file transfer?
Did you know that you will never be able to use all of your (e.g.) 2GB of RAM for applications?
Did you know that not every clock cycle of your fancy quad-core 2.66 Ghz processor is available for your applications?
Did you know that you are paying for 8 copper conductors in your CAT5 patch cables, but standard ethernet only uses 4?
Did you know that your 802.11g wireless connection will probably never give you 54mbps of useable bandwidth?
I can go on…
What rip-offs! And shocking, I’m sure… I should write some articles and get dugg!
They could just give you drives sized so that they come out at the round-figures (much better for advertising/reading to see 500gb than 46gb). So if they one that is say 550gb but advertise it at 500 then they wouldn’t be far wrong.
It does say on the small print of all the specs i’ve seen that they say ‘formatted size is around x’ (at least on my iBooks and Macbooks that i’ve purchase, also I think on my shuffle. I imagine this is the same across many computer firms
“Making the distinction clear” as suggested by one poster mere serves to sanctify the fraud. The simple fact of the matter is that the drives do no, can not, and never have held the quantities of data stated. All else is sham and fraud.
It is about time to bring an end to this shameless practice.
Even supposedly knowledgeable sources continue to propagate the misunderstanding by talking about putting 4.7 GB of data on a (single layer) DVD.
Enough!
fuck me, there’s some faggots about
are you that bothered about a minor loss of space?