| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
|---|
Sem, is it you or tiggy that reads The Register? Anyway, I was wondering if you had seen this or not. I have wondered the same thing myself. I recently aquired a "120 gb" hard drive, only to find it was actually 114 gigs. I know Unix reads the bytes differently then MS, and the compression is different, so I have always assumed that was the difference, in operating systems, and not a deception by the manufacturer, but I admit I could be wrong.... |
|
The difference between OS filesystems should be fairly negligible. It is the overhead of the formatting, etc. |
Mainly I think that the problem is over how much a "megabyte" is. Operating systems usually consider a megabyte to be 2 to the 10th power bytes, or 1024. Hard drive manufactures may be considering 1000 bytes to be a megabyte, which would let them report a larger amount of megabytes on the drive for the same amount of bytes. I'm sure there's some detailed discussion of this over at slashdot or k5. |
I bought a 20 gig WD HD before, and it turned out to be 18.6 when I got it home and installed, before any formatting. You would have break it down to: 1,000,000,000 bytes = 1GB versus reality: 1,073,741,824 bytes = 1 gig That is the only way you could get their numbers. That would be misrepresentation. |
You would have break it down to: 1,000,000,000 bytes = 1 GB versus reality: 1,073,741,824 bytes = 1 gig You will loose 70 megs per gig by correct calculations, which does lead to 20 gigs versus 18.6 That is the only way you could get their numbers. |
that is the nature of the legal complaint, using decimal instead of binary. i just over simplified it for the laymen. and the laydees. |
Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed I don't want that song in my head. |
Where the .5 gigs went, I don't care. The porn is the important part. |
|