I got myself a brand spanking new 500 gb hard drive which I put into my computer, but during partition/formatting it, Windows XP setup tells me I only have around 475 gb in total. To make things worse, once I get into Windows XP proper and take a look into My Computer, in total my two partitioned drives show a total of just 464 gb! Where the hell has the remaining 36 gb gone???
Ohh its pants. Its always robs a certain percentage off you. Some of it is boot sector, some of it is down to the fact size is actualy caculated in two different ways, 1mb is actualy 1,048,576 bytes. Its a 475gb drive, deal with it
Nooooo! I paid a small fortune for a 500GB hard drive, not a poxy 464GB. 36Gb is not to be sniffed at. Imagine all the porn I could store on there!
It's only gonna get worse. A long time ago hard drive companies won a court case about their misrepresentation of data storage, so there is a legal precedent that says that it's not false advertising. Although, there is little tiny small print on HD boxes that says something like "1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes" and another that says "actual formatted capacity less". In computers, a kilobyte refers to 1024 bytes, and a megabyte refers to 1024 kilobytres, etc etc. This is because data is stored in binary so it is logical to stick with powers of 2. However, due to a court that was uninformed about the way that the ENTIRE computer industry uses terminology, they ruled in favor of the HD companies since in SI units, 1,000 of something is kilo, 1,000,000 is mega, and 1,000,000,000 is giga. The higher capacities get, the more size you will lose. For just one GB, you give up only about 74MB. At a terabyte, you are giving up 99.5 GB. At a petabyte, you are giving up 125.9 terabytes. As you can see, the amount you lose keeps scaling to a higher and higher percentage. I think this issue will be revisited way down the line when people wonder why the fuck they lose 30% of their drive. In fact recently online it has riled up a bit, since TB drives are now fairly cheap, people like the idea of saying "I have a Terabyte of storage". Then they install the thing and see 9XX GB instead. Removes that warm and fuzzy feeling. In order to cope with this, they have come up with another set of dumb term GiB (Gibibyte) which refers to ACTUAL gigabytes (also KiB, Kibibyte and MiB Mebibyte etc). These of course sound stupid and nobody uses them.
Isn't there some way of formatting a harddrive to, instead of having a rounded number of space (IE 500 GB) so that it's...like 545 GB, then it drops down to about 500 GB to what's actually advertised? Like what Powa said, extra big-ass harddrives won't mean fuck shit if you keep losing more relative space the larger the harddrive gets.
Plus, I also heard in A+ class that every hardrive has some damaged sectors that the first factory format bypasses around, so you lose some space there too.
That would, of course, cost just a little bit more money to the companies, which means they'd pass it right on to you. While the stated vs. actual capacity canyon gets wider, however, the prices on these drives are also falling at a dramatic rate. For midrange drives, like the 500 GB ones for desktops, you're getting the best cost-per-gigabyte ever. Also, D, while it's true that factories will format around bad sectors, you've got to remember that a sector is something like 512 bytes. That means that in order to lose even a megabyte of storage capacity, a quarter of an average MP3, you'd have to have 2,048 bad sectors. That's a...lot. Likely wouldn't pass QC. Speaking of MP3s, D, you didn't delete that Octopus of Love one that I extracted out for you when you nuked your laptop, did you?
Shortly before they were bought by Seagate, Maxtor tried something like this. Their 300 GB drive was in fact 300 GB (well, 298); there was a sticker on the box that said "Bonus 20 GB", which (at 320 total*) would have been more what one would expect for a 298 GB drive. It was pretty obvious what was going on though. *2x double-sided 80GB/side platters
