Are 240GB and 256GB Drives actually the same size?

Roverno

Roverno

Roverno

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I feel pretty stupid asking this, but im looking at SSDs and just thinking if having 256gb over 240gb is actually an advantage?

Are they just measured differently e.g formated/non formated capacity? Or are they actually a different size?

Can't believe i just asked that :(
 
That makes me feel much less stupid, i expected them to be different. That puts an interesting spin on my purchase. More inclined to get a pair of corsair force 3 120gb than the M4s since performance is pretty much the same right?
 
Go with what your comfortable with

The M4 is the flavour of the month at the moment - and a damn fine SSD

If you want to run a raided pair do that :)

In the real world, everything SSD wise, is evolving quickly and the next quickest kid on the block is just round the corner.

If you was in a room with say,,,,,,, 6 different rigs and setups including a high speed vraptor you would be hard pushed to tell them apart :)

Sure between a conventional 7200rpm mechanical HDD ...... but between SSD's ..... not a chance. It's just pure benchmark scores only :)
 
ERR 1 thing, If i use RAID then boot times will be slower because it has to startup the onboard RAID Controller?
 
Roverno said:
But thats what counts!!! lol

Nothin to brag about if you cant benchmark...:D
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o.... ok :)

whatever floats your boat.... but investing in tech for a benchmark and then surfing the net a little and occasionally playing some FPS seems a bit extreme to be worry about which SSD to buy


damn this is overclockers!!!! lol
 
TBH i'd absolutely love the new corsair performance pro drives since i do kinda love corsair at the moment, but they are just a little to pricey to justify. As you say, real world performance is very similar, just benchmarks that change.
 
Roverno said:
Could you elaborate with proof plz?
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LOL, I have to prove a 256GB drive is a different size to a 240GB drive.

I have a Crucial M4 128GB, which is 128 gigabytes in size, appears in Windows as ~119GiB.

A 120GB drive, will appear under windows as ~111GiB.

It's nothing to do with formatting, it's simply that HD manufacturers use base 10 when sizing, i.e Gigabytes, rather than base 2, i.e Gibibytes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
 
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Found a link that suggests that a 240 drive is a 256 with 7% lopped off and used for " data management, and to maintain the drive's high-performance level"

I can't post the link because it's for a 240 drive not sold by OCUK :)

But comparing the performance quotes this appears to be the latest way of keeping the performance up and not degrading so quickly.
 
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Ok so it looks like my Initial idea of it being different was right. Makes sense given tha they are different numbers. Lol, I hate how stupid I become late in the evenings...
 
Spenty said:
Yeah same size I think once up and running there all 240 I think.
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I was reading this and had to double take, they are different.

Sandforce put space aside for replacing NAND that has become defective. I think they may have the same amount of NAND physically but the amount that can be logically addressed by the OS - which is the question by the OP, is different. If you get an M4 you would - in your instance - have 16GB more storage by running with an M4.
 
littlepuppy said:
I was reading this and had to double take, they are different.

Sandforce put space aside for replacing NAND that has become defective. I think they may have the same amount of NAND physically but the amount that can be logically addressed by the OS - which is the question by the OP, is different. If you get an M4 you would - in your instance - have 16GB more storage by running with an M4.
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+1

Each of these drives has 256 Gigabytes of storage onboard, though controller differences mean that 16GB of this is held back from the user on sandforce drives to maintain performance, while the Crucial drive allows you to access it all. Presumably if you fully filled the crucial drive then you would see a decent performance penalty, while if you filled all of the available space on the Sandforce drive it would maintain most of its performance.

Also, the "issue" with formatting the drive and getting a smaller available capacity than advertised is due to the difference between what the hard drive/SSD manufacturers mean when they say "GB". Hard drive manufacturers take "GB" to mean the S.I. definition of Gigabyte - 10^9 (ie 1 billion bytes), while microsoft and others use "GB" as a shorthand for Gibibyte or "GiB" which is 2^30 bytes (1.0737 Billion bytes). Therefore, when you format a 240 Gigabyte drive then windows sees it as ~223 Gibibytes (which it calls "GB").
 
When you said same size I couldn't figure out if you were referring to physical size or size after data loss lol
 
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