2TB is never really 2048 gigabytes to use!

No, it's a rip off, In the days of 40Mb drives, that is what you got 42 million bytes = 40 megabytes. In the mid nineties, HDD manufacturers started to quote in metricated (rounded) byte numbers.

However whats the issue really, drives are so massive and cheap that it is immaterial really. Read million bytes rather than megabytes.

Edit, I do have a 2Gb drive with 2111 million byte capacity from 1997, 2013 megabytes.
 
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nkata said:
No, it's a rip off, In the days of 40Mb drives, that is what you got 42 million bytes = 40 megabytes. In the mid nineties, HDD manufacturers started to quote in metricated (rounded) byte numbers.

However whats the issue really, drives are so massive and cheap that it is immaterial really. Read million bytes rather than megabytes.

Edit, I do have a 2Gb drive with 2111 million byte capacity from 1997, 2013 megabytes.
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Yeah but you gotta remember back in the old days when you had to configure the CHS in the bios or hdd controller card everybody who built/upgraded a PC knew what they were doing, and we expected our hard drive storage to be in base 2, today anybody can install the cpu/memory and let their nice jumper free motherboard auto configure everything and they can get windows up and running without even understanding what the parts they plugged together are.

Thats why manufacturers now list in Base 10 (decimal) so that the average user of today can understand it easily, its the same number you see in windows just in a different system, i.e 27/1B/11011 are all the same number just represented with different numbering systems.

Their not doing it to rip anybody off because we experts know how to calculate the difference and know what size the drive is to a computer but it makes it easier for the newbies.

Hard drive manufacturers calculate hard disk size in 'base 10' notation while Windows does the calculation in 'base 2' (binary) format. Both the manufacturer and Windows are giving you the "correct" number.

1 Gigabyte as defined by a manufacturer is 1,000,000,000,000 Bytes. This makes sense in the metric base 10 sense as we define kilo as 1000, mega as 1,000,000 and giga as 1,000,000,000,000.

Windows, however, calculates the disk size in a base 2 system. Base 2 does not convert into base 10 exactly in most cases but back in the day it was close enough so that a kilobyte was defined as 2^10 or 1024.

2^10 is 1024 is 1 kilobyte
2^20 is 1048576 or 1 megabyte
2^30 is 1073741824 or 1 gigabyte

When the hard disk manufacturer sold you a 120 Gig hard drive, they were selling you 120,000,000,000 bytes. Windows divides this number by what it considers a GB (1073741824) and reports the hard disk size as:

120000000000 (bytes) / 1073741824 (bytes per GB) = 111.8 GB

This accounts for the 'missing' 8.2 GB in the hard disk's size. You still have 120,000,000,000 bytes to use but because of inconsistent definitions of what kilo, mega and giga really represent, there is an inconsistency in the measurement of size.
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Can't believe some are still trying to argue this point as a scam. Almost all HDD manufacturers make the effort to explain this value on their sites (or in the manual) as well as stating that formatted capacity may vary with OS. Number of times I've seen some idiot on online shopping reviews scoring a storage product badly (or even returning it) just because they can't be bothered to do a little reading.

...its the same number you see in windows just in a different system, i.e 27/1B/11011 are all the same number just represented with different numbering systems.
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Exactly!
 
Sure, if you read the small print, most hard drive manufacturers admit that they use 1000 byte "k"'s etc. But I certainly wouldnt surprise me if this originated in the marketting departments of some hard drive makers, as a way to make the drives sound bigger when sitting on the shelf in a store etc.

Yet they still base their capacity on 8bit bytes.

If they truely wanted to be metric they would quote their capacity in bits instead :). A 1TB hard disk would be 8 Terabit, or if they "invented" 10 bit bytes, it would be 0.8TB.

To me, combining a binary based (8 bit) byte, with a decimal based K/M/G system is completely illogical, and only serves to allow storage manufacterers to inflate the numbers.

Our computers are binary, and process and store all their data using the binary system.

At least with networking, the decimal system is more honest, as they start at the bit level, NOT the byte level.
 
Corasik said:
Sure, if you read the small print, most hard drive manufacturers admit that they use 1000 byte "k"'s etc. But I certainly wouldnt surprise me if this originated in the marketting departments of some hard drive makers, as a way to make the drives sound bigger when sitting on the shelf in a store etc.

Yet they still base their capacity on 8bit bytes.
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but to be fair, they've been using the system for a very long time, and harddrives didn't really sit on shelves back there, so its unlikly anything to do with marketting.

it happened with the smaller drives as well, and because they were small drives, the amount of space "lost" was tiny and barely noticable.
and pretty much anyone buying harddrives then would be into computer hardware and know about it, making it not a good marketting trick tbh
 
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