HDD sizes

[Stern]

I recently bought a "120 GB" Seagate SATA HDD, and I was just wondering why HDD manufacturers keep advertising false sizes on their products. 120GB harddrive apparently means approx 111 GB. why don't they just call it a 111 GB HDD? if you work out the math it shows that it is actually about 120,000,000,000 Bytes. which, divided by 1024 3 times is about 111.75 GB. Are they just ignorant?

 

[Appledrop]

data storage capacity is generally expressed in metric, not binary, code.

 

[Jeffyboy]

Usually you end up with the capacity after you format. Fat32, NTFS... different formatting will yield different amounts of space available after formatting.

 

[ghackmann]

Originally posted by: Stern
I recently bought a "120 GB" Seagate SATA HDD, and I was just wondering why HDD manufacturers keep advertising false sizes on their products. 120GB harddrive apparently means approx 111 GB. why don't they just call it a 111 GB HDD?

I assume you're looking for an answer more complicated than "because 120 is bigger than 111" . . . ?

Seriously, that's the reason. If they go by powers of 10 rather than powers of 2, then they can advertise their drives as being slightly larger than they really are. It's sort of a relic from the days when storage wasn't as ridiculously cheap, and every last megabyte counted -- especially the ones you got for free by counting in the wrong base.

At least now they put a disclaimer on the box saying "1 GB = 10^9 bytes". Used to be you had to find out about the missing megabytes after you already bought it. I suspect the FTC had a hand in this one.

 

[slaves123]

SCSI's Hard drives have the amount of Gb's they tell

 

[TimothyX]

a bunch of savages these disk makers are! 9 gigs is a big chunk when learn about it the first time. as for how the disk format, i guess they could say ...NTFS/...FAT32 but there are other file systems as well as new ones to come so there would need to be a table of sizes. still, they could put it on the back of the box and give the size a 120 gigs* on the front. oh well, i hope the 9 gig difference hasnt been too difficult for you. it sucks when you come home to a low disk space message.

 

[Stern]

heh, I had a 60GB HDD and was running low on space, then I got this one and was like "never gonna run out of space again". hehe, now i need a 200 GB HDD

 

[Bassyhead]

Originally posted by: Jeffyboy
Usually you end up with the capacity after you format. Fat32, NTFS... different formatting will yield different amounts of space available after formatting.

Formatting space isn't a huge issue. The space taken up by formatting is usually in the megabytes for most hard drives, far less than the gigabytes of discrepency between metric and binary counting of hard drive space.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: TimothyX
a bunch of savages these disk makers are! 9 gigs is a big chunk when learn about it the first time.

To be fair, most of the rest of the computer industry is horribly misusing the "kilo-", "mega-" and "giga-" (and also "tera-" and "peta-") prefixes, which have defined meanings to the rest of the world (10^3, 10^6, 10^9, 10^12, and 10^15, respectively). Technically speaking, the drive makers are accurate, and what you probably think of as a "gigabyte" (2^30 bytes) is really a gibibyte.

From wikipedia on binary prefixes

Certain units are always understood as decimal even in computing contexts. For example, hertz (Hz), which is used to measure clock rates of electronic components, and bit/s, used to measure bitrate. So a 1 GHz processor performs 1,000,000,000 clock ticks per second, a 128 kbit/s MP3 stream consumes 128,000 bits (15.625 KiB) per second, and a 1 Mbit/s internet connection can transfer 1,000,000 bits (approx. 122 KiB) per second.

Measurements of electronic memory such as RAM and ROM are given in binary units, because the physical structure of the device makes it naturally come in sizes that are powers of two. This is the case whether the capacity is given in bits or bytes.

Hard disk drive manufacturers state capacity decimal units, so what is advertised as a "30 GB" hard drive will hold 30 × 109 bytes, roughly equal to 28×230 bytes (i.e. 28 GiB). This usage has a long engineering tradition, and was probably not influenced by marketing. It arose because nothing about the physical structure of the disk drives makes power-of-two capacities natural: the number of platters, tracks and sectors per track are all continuously variable.

Modern-day PC users, of course, regard both RAM and disk as kinds of storage and expect their capacities to be measured in the same way. Operating systems usually report HD space using the binary version. To the purchaser of a "30 GB" hard drive, rather than reporting either "30 GB" or "28 GiB", Microsoft Windows reports "28 GB." This creates hard feelings, sometimes made worse by other technical issues such as failure to distinguish between unformatted and formatted capacities.

In 1999, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) published Amendment 2 to "IEC 60027-2: Letter symbols to be used in electrical technology ? Part 2: Telecommunications and electronics";. This standard, which had been approved in 1998, introduced the prefixes kibi-, mebi-, gibi-, tebi-, pebi-, exbi-, to be used in specifying binary multiples of a quantity. The names come from the first two letters of the original SI prefixes followed by bi which is short for "binary". It also clarifies that, from the point of view of the IEC, the SI prefixes only have their base-10 meaning and never have a base-2 meaning.

I always find it a little odd that nobody thinks twice of a "3.0Ghz" processor running at 3,000,000,000 Hz, but almost everyone expects a "3GB" hard drive to contain 3,221,225,472 bytes -- not 3,000,000,000! Why do you feel that hard drive makers are ripping you off, but Intel isn't?

Also, they've been doing this since hard drive capacities were measured in handfuls of megabytes. The difference between a GB and GiB is much bigger than between a MB and MeB.

 

[Stern]

I don't use Intel, and AMD don't name their processors according to their actual speed

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Stern
I don't use Intel, and AMD don't name their processors according to their actual speed

OK, but AMD still sells their processors at "1.8Ghz" or whatever actual clock speed they are, which is measured with the metric "giga-", not the binary "giga-". It's running at 1,800,000,000 cycles/sec, not 1,932,735,283 cycles/sec. Why is this perfectly OK, but it's a scam when they do it for hard drive capacities?

 

[Stern]

I never said it was perfectly OK, and i didn't even mention CPU's in my original post

 

[Bassyhead]

Originally posted by: Stern
I don't use Intel, and AMD don't name their processors according to their actual speed

That's because clock speed is not the only factor in a processor's performance abilities. Intel is doing the same thing now, using model numbers but both companies still list clock speeds.

 

[Spencer278]

I always find it a little odd that nobody thinks twice of a "3.0Ghz" processor running at 3,000,000,000 Hz, but almost everyone expects a "3GB" hard drive to contain 3,221,225,472 bytes -- not 3,000,000,000! Why do you feel that hard drive makers are ripping you off, but Intel isn't?

Because Windows doesn't tell me my 3.0Ghz CPU is really a 2.7 Ghz CPU yet it does tell me my 160 GB hard drive is really 152 GB's

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Spencer278

I always find it a little odd that nobody thinks twice of a "3.0Ghz" processor running at 3,000,000,000 Hz, but almost everyone expects a "3GB" hard drive to contain 3,221,225,472 bytes -- not 3,000,000,000! Why do you feel that hard drive makers are ripping you off, but Intel isn't?

Because Windows doesn't tell me my 3.0Ghz CPU is really a 2.7 Ghz CPU yet it does tell me my 160 GB hard drive is really 152 GB's

Then your issue is with Windows. Tell them to change the display to tell you your hard drive contains "160GB (152 GiB)". Of course, then we'll be inundated with posts from people who are like "WTF is a GiB, and why does my hard drive have only 152 of them?!?!"

 

[Stern]

Windows makes it obvious that a HDD is actually smaller than advertised, doesn't do the same thing for processor though, why is it windows fault? it's the HDD manufacturers fault, they should just advertise the same size as shows up in Windows

 

[Bassyhead]

Originally posted by: Stern
Windows makes it obvious that a HDD is actually smaller than advertised, doesn't do the same thing for processor though, why is it windows fault? it's the HDD manufacturers fault, they should just advertise the same size as shows up in Windows

The "advertised" size and the size that Windows reports are both correct. There isn't anything mismatching about the two numbers. They are COMPLETELY different units and hence can't be compared directly for the same reason you can't directly compare an inch and a centimeter without doing some conversion.

 

[thermalpaste]

1Gb = 1024MB, 1MB = 1024 KB.....so ita actually a 120,000,000,000 bytes HDD.....not a 120 gig HDD...........
try [{ (120,000,000,000/1024)/1024}/1024] and that may be the actual size of your HDD

 

[Stern]

Originally posted by: thermalpaste
1Gb = 1024MB, 1MB = 1024 KB.....so ita actually a 120,000,000,000 bytes HDD.....not a 120 gig HDD...........
try [{ (120,000,000,000/1024)/1024}/1024] and that may be the actual size of your HDD

Thats exactly what I said in my original post

 

[TheStu]

I always find it a little odd that nobody thinks twice of a "3.0Ghz" processor running at 3,000,000,000 Hz, but almost everyone expects a "3GB" hard drive to contain 3,221,225,472 bytes -- not 3,000,000,000! Why do you feel that hard drive makers are ripping you off, but Intel isn't?

How exactly is Intel / AMD ripping you off? No one said or has ever said that CPU manufacturers measure their processor speeds in binary... Now I am also not saying that the Hard Drive manufacturers are ripping me off either... they are using the scale that works... base 10. With the exception of those that will argue all day that 1 + 2 equals 11 Everyone else is completely comfortable with base ten... Additionally most won't even notice that the 80GB hard drive in their matte new dell (since they aren't all that shiny.. save for the CRT monitor screens... ) are actually 74.50 GiB (i think I have the units right... ) they aren't thinking anything is wrong... I personally don't feel that a 3GB drive contains 3,221,225,472 bytes... and I think the answer to the OP's question (which actually may have been answered at this point) is that they label it using base ten but bytes work on a base two and that is where the discrepancy lies I don't think he was implying he was cheated just that he was curios about the 'false advertising'

 

[daniel1113]

Originally posted by: Stern
Are they just ignorant?

No... they just have fantastic advertising departments.

 

[ZL1]

Originally posted by: Stern
I recently bought a "120 GB" Seagate SATA HDD, and I was just wondering why HDD manufacturers keep advertising false sizes on their products. 120GB harddrive apparently means approx 111 GB. why don't they just call it a 111 GB HDD? if you work out the math it shows that it is actually about 120,000,000,000 Bytes. which, divided by 1024 3 times is about 111.75 GB. Are they just ignorant?

120gb maxtors show up as 122.9gb


D

 

[Stern]

how does that work out?

 

[ZL1]

Originally posted by: Stern
how does that work out?

you about my post ?
if so I dont quite understand what you are asking


D

 

[Benmohr]

#1 The answer is very simple.....

People in Marketing can't do Maths!, its to complicated for them!!!