Why doesn’t my hard drive have the advertised amount of space?

[acidosmosis]

I’m sure that at some point someone has told you that a Kilobyte is 1024 Bytes. If we are pedantic about the terminology used in describing storage however, they are wrong. A Kilobyte is by definition 1000 bytes, Kilo literally denoting 10^3 of something. What they are talking about is, in fact, a Kibibyte (2^10 Bytes.) This inconsistency causes problems because when people start talking about computer storage - Kilo is suddenly used incorrectly to mean “2^10” rather than the proper “10^3.”

Here Follows a quick terminology break.....

..continued at http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=136

I find that this is pretty useful information. There is a lot of confusion about this subject.

 

[MrGaribaldi]

Bah, has that surfaced again...

The industry (IEC) implemented kibi, mebi/mibi, gibi etc. bytes, a while ago, so it is correct, but most people think of a megabyte as 1024 kilobytes, which in turn is 1024 bytes...Which isn't too strange considering people has used kilo and mega since at least the 70's meaning 1024...

IMO, it's strange that they suddenly decided that we've been doing things wrong for ages, and now we should change our way... It's already hard enough for most people to get their head around what a Megabyte and Gigabyte is, so why would you want to confuse them further by changing the name?

To me this sounds like politics at it's worst, as it's (most likely) only done to make it easier on harddrive manufacturers... If you look at games and programs, they still use the old way...


Oh, well, the article isn't too bad... At least it'll help people understand why their new harddrive won't show all the Gigabytes (I'll use the word with the old meaning until physically forced otherwise!) they expected...

 

[Tarkus]

Yeah, and a 21 inch monitor is less than 20 inches. Bet those marketing dept types are telling their wives they're 9 inches too.