Cheated on the Harddrive?

[fauch]

The real question is WHY do they do this (except to make the drives look bigger than they actually are)???

[Mr645]

This car gets 36 MPG highway *1 mile =5000 feet

Fabric, just 80¢ per meter * 1 meter = 30 inches



No more truthful than saying a Megabyte = 1000000 bytes

[incognegro]

fauch wrote:
The real question is WHY do they do this (except to make the drives look bigger than they actually are)???

A very good point. The right thing to do would be put the drive size as the typically formatted capacity, rather than unformatted... since nobody buys hard drives NOT to format and use them.

[RAMd®d]

Well, I knew you lost some to formating but didn't realize so much.

It's not lost in formatting. Actual formatting takes a small portion of that "loss".

It's the difference between the marketing telling you you're buying a 500G HD, and you finding there's only 479G of actual storage.

This is similar to buying CRT TVs or monitors (remember those) and being told that it was a 27" TV or a 17" monitor and finding out that the actual viewing area was only 25" or 16" respectively.

As has been pointed out, the unit size (GB) is assigned two different values as a "standard". As the HD size increases, so does the amount of space "lost".

I think 1T ends up around 928G, but I don't do the math.

[RAMd®d]

The right thing to do would be put the drive size as the typically formatted capacity, rather than unformatted...


The right thing to do would be to put the capacity on the box in standard size units, like Apple and other sites do instead of using Fine Print

In a previous thread here, somebody made a case for manufacturers using a different standard, but I don't remember if it convinced anybody.

I wouldn't mind manufactures rounding down for advertising's sake because nobody really wants to deal with reading "NOW WITH APPROXIMATELY 1 TRILLION BYTES!" or even "935GB!!"

The bigger the drive, the bigger the discrepancy, and it's not really right for manufacturers to be allowed to mislead the *general* public.