hard drives not what they say they are

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tonyhughes

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Reply # 725186 30-Nov-2012 15:26
Maybe worse as the relative ratio of 'lost' space stays the same, but as drives get bigger, the raw total amount of 'lost' spaces looks soooo big. 'Lost' space on common SATA drives now being much bigger than total actual space of hard drives 10 years ago. Storm in a teacup - read the Wikipedia articles, learn up, impress your friends with your knowledge the next time it comes up. And pick up chicks too I'd say. Visit http://www.thecloud.net.nz for New Zealand based Hosted Exchange, Virtual Servers, Web Hosting, FTP Backup & more. (1GB free FTP storage, or larger plans from $5.75) - Setup your own mailserver at home on Ubuntu Server - full step by step howto here. - Have you seen this: Nathan "KFC4LIFE" Dunn.

ubergeeknz

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Reply # 725226 30-Nov-2012 16:50
tonyhughes: And pick up chicks too I'd say. And then she said "Your hard drive is just not as big as you say it is!"

sittingduckz

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Reply # 726156 3-Dec-2012 13:44
ubergeeknz: tonyhughes: And pick up chicks too I'd say. And then she said "Your hard drive is just not as big as you say it is!" Nothing worse than a 5.25" drive bay and only a 3.5" floppy to fill it!!

Kyanar

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Reply # 726173 3-Dec-2012 13:56
sidefx: Which is correct and illustrates where the standardised binary prefixes are less confusing in distinguishing between the two: 1TB = 1000GB = 1 000 000 MB = 1000 000 000 KB = 1000 000 000 000 Bytes = 976 562 500 KiB = 953 674 MiB = 931 GiB But given they've barely been adopted at all in the hardware\software industry the confusion is just something we live with. They haven't been adopted because they're stupid. Noone wants to randomly change the measurement system that's been happily in use by everyone except hard drive manufacturers for the last 30 years simply because someone got their panties in a bunch about misuse of SI prefixes. And they certainly don't want to change to a system where every unit sounds like something their cat vomits up on the floor. 1TB=1024GB. That is all.

NonprayingMantis

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Reply # 726189 3-Dec-2012 14:18
it gets more confusing IMO when ISPs can't decide what to use for the data caps. sometimes a 1GB plan means 1000MB, sometimes it means 1024MB (same for does 1TB = 1024GB or 1000GB) a 250MB plan is common, but so is a 256MB plan. Which of those is a quarter of 1GB? etc

tonyhughes

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Reply # 726199 3-Dec-2012 14:44
Kyanar: 1TB=1024GB. That is all. +1 Visit http://www.thecloud.net.nz for New Zealand based Hosted Exchange, Virtual Servers, Web Hosting, FTP Backup & more. (1GB free FTP storage, or larger plans from $5.75) - Setup your own mailserver at home on Ubuntu Server - full step by step howto here. - Have you seen this: Nathan "KFC4LIFE" Dunn.

sidefx

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Reply # 726202 3-Dec-2012 14:47
Kyanar: They haven't been adopted because they're stupid. Noone wants to randomly change the measurement system that's been happily in use by everyone except hard drive manufacturers for the last 30 years simply because someone got their panties in a bunch about misuse of SI prefixes. And they certainly don't want to change to a system where every unit sounds like something their cat vomits up on the floor. 1TB=1024GB. That is all. Except it hasn't been "happily in use by everyone except hard drive manufacturers" in computing. There are plenty of other examples. GigE is 1,000,000,000 bits per second. CD-ROM speeds (1x, 4x, etc) are based on metric. DVD capacities are generally quoted in metric. A 1 GHz processor run at... well you can probably guess. It's just created in a weird mix in the computing world where while most people in the industry know where each is used, there are still plenty of gotchas.

hamish225

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Reply # 726258 3-Dec-2012 15:48
the least they could all do is if they indeed are using metric they should use the appropriate unit name. so just to clarify, GIB is metric and gb is the other one? hahahahaha thanks for the replies and the laugh :P

jonherries

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Reply # 726324 3-Dec-2012 17:04
[jk] No way, I am sure that it is the sales people in the shop. They are skimming some GB off the top of each drive to sell for the christmas party slush fund. The GB sit inside like ball bearings packed really tightly. You can tell the ones that have been skimmed because when you have them plugged in and give them a shake they make a rattling noise. Bigger drives use smaller GBs. [/jk] I won't be liable for you shaking your hard drive. Jon

freitasm

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Reply # 726330 3-Dec-2012 17:14
sidefx: Kyanar: They haven't been adopted because they're stupid. Noone wants to randomly change the measurement system that's been happily in use by everyone except hard drive manufacturers for the last 30 years simply because someone got their panties in a bunch about misuse of SI prefixes. And they certainly don't want to change to a system where every unit sounds like something their cat vomits up on the floor. 1TB=1024GB. That is all. Except it hasn't been "happily in use by everyone except hard drive manufacturers" in computing. There are plenty of other examples. GigE is 1,000,000,000 bits per second. CD-ROM speeds (1x, 4x, etc) are based on metric. DVD capacities are generally quoted in metric. A 1 GHz processor run at... well you can probably guess. It's just created in a weird mix in the computing world where while most people in the industry know where each is used, there are still plenty of gotchas. No, not... Where bits and bytes are used - binary quantities, M, G, T are well established as a 1024 multiplier. The "GHz processor" example is wrong because the Hz measurement is not binary. As per this 1000 is to be used for powers of 10 and 1024 for powers of 2. Mauricio Freitas (Geekzone Admin, Devil's Advocate, my blog, technology disclosure, my tweets, Web Performance Optimization) Geekzone Price comparison \| Amazon Kindle order page \| How to get the best out of Geekzone \| New Zealand IT Jobs \| Geekzone News \| Jinglebugs

sidefx

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Reply # 726351 3-Dec-2012 17:47
freitasm: No, not... Where bits and bytes are used - binary quantities, M, G, T are well established as a 1024 multiplier. The "GHz processor" example is wrong because the Hz measurement is not binary. As per this 1000 is to be used for powers of 10 and 1024 for powers of 2. No... where bytes are used M,G,T often mean the binary prefixes, but there are exceptions; DDR-RAM (e.g. PC3-12800 where peak transfer rate is 12,800MB/s) peak transfer rate is quoted in metric (MB per second where MB means 1000 mutliplier) even though RAM size always means binary prefix. Using the binary prefixes would clear this up (along the other examples, CD-ROM speeds, DVD sizes, I gave which I note you've ignored as they didn't fit with your viewpoint? :P)

raytaylor

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Reply # 727129 4-Dec-2012 23:08
hamish225: the least they could all do is if they indeed are using metric they should use the appropriate unit name. so just to clarify, GIB is metric and gb is the other one? hahahahaha thanks for the replies and the laugh :P Problem is GB = gigaByte Gb = gigabit The upper case B = Byte, or 8 bits The lower case b = bit, or 1/8th of a byte So if your hard drive had 1024 GB of storage, it would have 8192 Gb of storage Historically Bytes were used to measure the capacity of a storage medium such as a hard drive, and bits were used to measure a network speed between computers (bits per second) Older networking systems such as serial cables etc. didnt necessarily use protocols that had 8 bits to one Byte. So the standard form of measurement was to measure speed in bits. At this time you would use a cassette tape to store your data and you didnt buy it in storage capacity because different systems read and write to the cassette at different speeds - so you just had the 60 or 90 min tapes. However at this time it was common for you to dial up to a BBS system or use a serial cable to link computers and because of the different formats, bits per second was used to measure the speed of your modem or cable. Later when digital consumer storage mediums entered the retail market - such as floppy disks and hard disks, the format of 8 bits to a Byte was common and so capacity in bytes became the standard. Correct me if i am wrong GIB and gib would be good if only the G was used to tell the difference, but because there is already too much confusion between bits and Bytes, it would just add to the difficulty. 1 GB = 1024 MB +1 I dont like mac computers artifically rounding numbers like suggested above. One of the many reasons i dont use them. They dumb things down and when you do that, you get consumers ringing up saying things like the op's original question. HDD manufacturers should go back to using the proper 1024x system. Or advertise a Terrabyte hard drive capable of 1,073,741,824 bytes. But that wont stop the problem of a hard drive file system such as EXT, FAT, FAT32 or NTFS having its own overhead and removing part of that capacity - still causing a mismatch in numbers between raw capacity and what is shown on the end user's screen. The hard drive manufacturer cannot control what operating system, file format or how the files are organised and managed on the hard drive, and therefore cannot guarantee that you will get a certain amount of USABLE capacity - they can only guarantee an amount of RAW capacity. I had this conversation with a lame customer who bought a computer from a retail company i worked for a few years ago. Basically he was trying to come up with a reason to get out of his hire purchase contract after 3 months of signing it because he wanted to buy dragon ball z cards off trademe instead. Anyhow the argument of computer manufactures such as Dell, Acer, HP and Asus using the hard drive manufacturers specifications is also moot - because the pc maker may sell it with windows, that had its file managment overheads, but the customer is free to install linux or anything else that may use less space for file managment. Therefore they too can only tell you the raw data capacity, and it comes back to the end user to decide how they want to use it. If the end user decides to use an operating system that reserves 10% for file managment then thats up to them. Ray Taylor Napier, NZ www.taylorcommunications.co.nz

hamish225

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Reply # 727289 5-Dec-2012 10:28
raytaylor: hamish225: the least they could all do is if they indeed are using metric they should use the appropriate unit name. so just to clarify, GIB is metric and gb is the other one? hahahahaha thanks for the replies and the laugh :P Problem is GB = gigaByte Gb = gigabit The upper case B = Byte, or 8 bits The lower case b = bit, or 1/8th of a byte So if your hard drive had 1024 GB of storage, it would have 8192 Gb of storage Historically Bytes were used to measure the capacity of a storage medium such as a hard drive, and bits were used to measure a network speed between computers (bits per second) Older networking systems such as serial cables etc. didnt necessarily use protocols that had 8 bits to one Byte. So the standard form of measurement was to measure speed in bits. At this time you would use a cassette tape to store your data and you didnt buy it in storage capacity because different systems read and write to the cassette at different speeds - so you just had the 60 or 90 min tapes. However at this time it was common for you to dial up to a BBS system or use a serial cable to link computers and because of the different formats, bits per second was used to measure the speed of your modem or cable. Later when digital consumer storage mediums entered the retail market - such as floppy disks and hard disks, the format of 8 bits to a Byte was common and so capacity in bytes became the standard. Correct me if i am wrong GIB and gib would be good if only the G was used to tell the difference, but because there is already too much confusion between bits and Bytes, it would just add to the difficulty. 1 GB = 1024 MB +1 I dont like mac computers artifically rounding numbers like suggested above. One of the many reasons i dont use them. They dumb things down and when you do that, you get consumers ringing up saying things like the op's original question. HDD manufacturers should go back to using the proper 1024x system. Or advertise a Terrabyte hard drive capable of 1,073,741,824 bytes. But that wont stop the problem of a hard drive file system such as EXT, FAT, FAT32 or NTFS having its own overhead and removing part of that capacity - still causing a mismatch in numbers between raw capacity and what is shown on the end user's screen. The hard drive manufacturer cannot control what operating system, file format or how the files are organised and managed on the hard drive, and therefore cannot guarantee that you will get a certain amount of USABLE capacity - they can only guarantee an amount of RAW capacity. I had this conversation with a lame customer who bought a computer from a retail company i worked for a few years ago. Basically he was trying to come up with a reason to get out of his hire purchase contract after 3 months of signing it because he wanted to buy dragon ball z cards off trademe instead. Anyhow the argument of computer manufactures such as Dell, Acer, HP and Asus using the hard drive manufacturers specifications is also moot - because the pc maker may sell it with windows, that had its file managment overheads, but the customer is free to install linux or anything else that may use less space for file managment. Therefore they too can only tell you the raw data capacity, and it comes back to the end user to decide how they want to use it. If the end user decides to use an operating system that reserves 10% for file managment then thats up to them. if someone's at an age where they want dragon ball Z cards i don't think they should be allowed to sign HP agreements :P

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