500gb only showing as 465gb

SpudMaster · 17 Jul 2007 at 23:56

Got a 500gb WD AAKS drive recently and windows says its total capacity is 465gb. I wasnt expecting it to be bang on 500gb but wasnt expecting to be losing 35gb??

Does this sound about right?? or is something up?? :confused:

sunama · 18 Jul 2007 at 00:03

That is spot on.

(actual hard drive size) = (listed hard drive size)/(1.024*1.024*1.024)

465GB = 500GB/(1.024*1.024*1.024)

Will_3rd · 18 Jul 2007 at 00:09

yep bang on my Seagate 500GB has the same capacity 465GB

fobose · 18 Jul 2007 at 00:14

Yup same here with my 500GB Seagates, I lose 21GB with my 300GB drive! (well not lose but you know what I mean).

mi9tchy · 18 Jul 2007 at 00:16

voodlegun

Delboy · 18 Jul 2007 at 00:27

mi9tchy said:
they should change it one day so not to confuse people who don't know that much about computers

My thoughts exactly, especially as the size of the drives are getting so large now, on a 1TB drive you'd be missing up to nearly 100Gb.

SpudMaster · 18 Jul 2007 at 00:41

ok well thats good then

cheers

dark_hag666 · 18 Jul 2007 at 13:58

I think I'm right in saying that you hard drive is exactly 500 Gigabytes.

However, Windows reports the number of binary bytes, so there are 465 Gibibytes

fobose · 18 Jul 2007 at 14:24

Maybe they should market it in Gib instead

ChrisD. · 18 Jul 2007 at 14:33

fobose said:
Maybe they should market it in Gib instead

Would you if you were selling drives? It's like a sports car manufacturer being able to get away with advertising a 500 horsepower car when it only has 415, though with hard drives it's perfectly legal. I wouldn't change it if I was in charge of pricing products or advertising it.

There's bugger all the authorities can do either as it's 100% accurate information.

RichDuffy · 18 Jul 2007 at 17:18

I'm interested to know at what point exactly they thought it was acceptable to redefine megabytes and gigabytes, and give us a ridiculous word like gibibyte in return... And it seems to only be hard drives (and Flash memory).

The fact is that PCs work in binary. Storage is composed of zeroes and ones. A kilobyte was originally defined as 1024 bytes because we all know 1000 is not a power of 2. When did that suddenly become unacceptable? My guess is when it became profitable to mislead the public with bigger numbers. RAM is still sold in traditional definitions of GB. I have 1GB of RAM in my PC and it registers as 1048576 KB in the BIOS. The 48K Spectrum had 49152 bytes of RAM. The C64 had 65536 bytes (even though a fair chunk of that was used up by the OS).

Journey · 19 Jul 2007 at 00:44

I agree they should stick with the 1024MB in a GB and not confuse people. I don't know why they don't just start selling a 500GB as a 465GB drive it's no like anyone is gonna give a hoot, at least you don't end up feeling conned if you know little about these things.

I'd be annoyed to find my 1TB drive that cost 4x as much as a 500GB hard drive, was in fact only 930GB.. you lose all the bragging rights

mosfet · 19 Jul 2007 at 21:20

This has been absolutely discussed to death and a quick search will reveal the answers.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17706198

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17649350

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17593808

You're not being ripped off, there are simply two different counting systems that are relevant for different technologies.

As for the question of who decided the definition, the prefixes were defined by the International System of Units (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units) in 1960.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix