New WD Hard Disk

[Anonymous]

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/01/27/wd_500gb_hdd/

[GhostMjr]

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?

[Sn00ks]

They use sales-persons Gigas, Megas, Teras and Petas. Rather than 1024 times they use 1000 times for each increase in magnitude.

[Anonymous]

plus you need space set aside for the FAT etc

[Carr0t]

Originally 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]

[/b]

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.