How do they get away with it?

[midlandman]

I upgraded my HD and installed an 80G and a 40G.Or so it was supposed to be.Why are they actually only 74.52G and 37.26G?Is there no guidelines saying that they should not rip me off for almost 8 1/4 Gigs of space?Why not just label it correctly?
How do they get away with it?

 

[Skivvywaver]

You lose some with the partition, and also they count a gig as 1000 megabytes when selling drives, and windows tends to see them as needing 1024 megabytes to be a gigabyte.

It happens all the time and is quite normal.

 

[McTimson]

Yea...on my Maxtor box, it says 'A Gigabyte (GB) means 1 billion bytes.' Windows determines 1GB as 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024x1024x1024). So basically, for every GB the drive claims, you lose about 73MB.

 

[Big-K]

My system drive is a 40 gigabytes drive, and yet its only shown as 37. My secondary drive is a 1.2gig one and its shown as 1.02gig. I see it as like sales tax. You can't buy a ten dollar item with 10 dollars, you have to have a bit more. You can't buy a 40 gig hd, its always a bit less.

 

[Gibble]

It's not a scam. Look at it this way

There are two definitions for gigabyte... Like McTimson said, in computers, 1GB is 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024x1024x1024). So an '80GB' drive is 80,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 = 74.5GB

It's been like that ever since the beginning. Only when drives were only a 100MB, or 1GB, it wasn't a noticeable amount to matter. Now, with drives being 10s and 100s of GB, it's noticeable.

 

[Omega_Shadow]

If you are that concered about knowing the actual size of the drive when you buy it (and a geek like me who carries a calculator around wherever I go ) do the math Gibble showed you when you are looking at drives. That way you know exactly what you are buying

 

[Skivvywaver]

Or take a hammer and beat the other 5.48 gigabytes out of it.

I have a dead 80 I'd like to try it on but I might end up finding a board for it someday so I'll not try it just yet.

 

[Omega_Shadow]

SkivvyWaver, I have a 200MB, 512MB and a wopping 10 MB hard drives still in storage. If you want I can send them over to you for your hammering pleasure

 

[Skivvywaver]

, My sister had a hard drive die and her husband beat it to pieces before they tossed it in the trash. It had all their financial documents on it and he wanted to be sure it was unrecoverable.

 

[midlandman]

So,that explains it.I didn't know it was that way.I thought a gig was a gig.Live and learn.But I can't see me taking a calculator with me,with my luck it'll probably crash.