2TB is never really 2048 gigabytes to use!

psd99

psd99

psd99

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It is false advertisement you spend money on a 2TB drive and yet you don't even get 1900GB.

The larger these drives are becoming the more we all lose.

Why did we even get to this?
 
it's not terabyte vs terabit. If anything it's tebibyte vs terabyte.

the 2TB sold by hd manufacturers is 2 000 000 000 i.e 10 to the 9. , base 10

2TB is also calculated as 1024 bytes = 1 kb i.e. base 2, 2 to the 10 = 1024

so if you work it out 2 000 000 000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 1.86 TB
 
Echo said:
More like 9.9%, I get 1,863GB formatted.
Click to expand...
The discrepancy will be compounded as you go up in scale - 1024 is 2.4% more than 1000, but 1024x1024 (1048576) is about 4.8% more than 1000x1000, and so on.

psd99 said:
But what about Linux?

I thought it is all OS's
Click to expand...
Ubuntu has in fact recently switched to expressing gigabytes, terabytes etc in the same way as HDD manufacturers (the correct way according to the SI convention). I guess they were trying to be helpful, but it seems to have resulted in yet more confusion. :)
 
psd99 said:
It is false advertisement you spend money on a 2TB drive and yet you don't even get 1900GB.

The larger these drives are becoming the more we all lose.

Why did we even get to this?
Click to expand...

It's not a false advertisement it's the correct measurement as given by the SI system that Europe uses.
 
its because we count using decimal and computers count in binary, the 2tb is in our system and the 1.xxtb is in theirs.

Similarly American gallons are 3.79 Litres and British gallons are 4.55 Litres, this means if you have 3.79 Litres there you have a gallon but here you have less than a gallon, the hard drive is the correct size but windows calculates terabytes using a different system to us, and yes it is confusing.

Basically in scientific notation one million bytes is, well one million bytes, just like a million pounds is a million pounds, a million bricks is-etc. however because computers count in base 2 binary (1/2/4/8/16/32/64/128/256/512/1024/etc) a kilobyte for them is 1024 bytes, a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes. and thus 1GB = 1024MB (1073741824 bytes) to a computer. they are seeing the same drive as us but they need more bytes to make that million/billion/trillion mark. Its not false advertising its just their giving us the number in decimal because that what we humans use.
 
CaptainCrash said:
Ubuntu has in fact recently switched to expressing gigabytes, terabytes etc in the same way as HDD manufacturers (the correct way according to the SI convention). I guess they were trying to be helpful, but it seems to have resulted in yet more confusion. :)
Click to expand...

OS X has been doing that for a while too, there was quite an uproar in the Mac community as the OS still counted all capacities in base 2, but displayed them in base 10, so there was always a difference between how much space you thought you had and how much space you actually had.

But seriously though, who cares? This whine has been going since hard disks have had capacity enough for the discrepancy to be more than a couple MB. get over it. :rolleyes:
 
just imagine how much we will lose when we get 1 petabyte drives....... that is why I am worried for the kids of tomorrow
 
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