http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/01/27/wd_500gb_hdd/ (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/01/27/wd_500gb_hdd/)
One question that think is relevant here is why are the hard drives i buy never what they are advertised as. They come close but are never exactly the gb shown on the box why is that?
They use sales-persons Gigas, Megas, Teras and Petas. Rather than 1024 times they use 1000 times for each increase in magnitude.
plus you need space set aside for the FAT etc
QuoteOriginally posted by Sn00ks@Jan 27 2006, 02:07 PM
They use sales-persons Gigas, Megas, Teras and Petas. Rather than 1024 times they use 1000 times for each increase in magnitude.
[post=110697]Quoted post[/post]
If I recall correctly they've actually officially reclassified the definitions. A megabyte is now 1000 kilobytes, which is itself 1000 bytes, and a gigabyte is 1000 megabytes. So as you increase what you're measuring in the discrepancy between what you expect and what Windows reports gets greater. Technically, once again if I recall correctly, 1024 bytes is a kibibyte, 1024 kibibytes is a mebibyte, and 1024 mebibytes is a gibibyte. Windows still uses the 'old' system, and what it reports as 1GB is 1024MB, which is 1024*1024KB.
Plus, as Blueball said, there's the space needed for the FAT table (or equivalent, depending on what OS and filesystem you're using) and this will be larger on a larger disk.