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Hard Drive Question

kenezzite

kenezzite

Active Member
Joined
Jan 24, 2004
Messages
479
Location
USA
I bought a new computer, Sony Vaio. But my compacityis 227MB, on the computer there is a label that says that the HardDrive is 250MB, what a lie. Now why would they do that? I'm thinking of buy the 400MB HD, now is it going to be 370MB or something like that? Why?
 
I think you mean GB instead of MB dude... and Hard Drive are never up to the advertised amount because of Bad-sectors on the disk....
 
Yes my bad I do mean GB :bangin: . TechZ why would they say its 250GB than, Can I unformat it and have 250GB? if yes, is it save to do that?
 
No you cant. Its just more or less a sales gimmic to my knowledge. Could go into exact detail, but Kanderson did in the other thread:

Kanderson said:
Actually, it doesn't lose space at all. Your 120 gig drive is actually a 114 gig drive, but it depends on whether you're talking to your operating system (114) or the hard drive manufacturer's marketing department (120).

Hard drive manufacturers use base 10 to calculate a gigabyte:
1K = 1000 bytes
1M = 1000 K
1G = 1000 M

That means a 120 gig drive is 120,000,000,000 bytes.

Computers and their operating systems use Base 2, binary (or base 16, hexadecimal), so:
1K = 1024 bytes
1M = 1024 K
1G = 1024 M

Therefore, 120,000,000,000 divided by 1024 / 1024 / 1024 is 114, not 120.

This is how marketing can exaggerate without getting sued for misrepresentation.
Click to expand...
 
It's just the way they count a GB.

Look at the capacity of my "400" GB HD in bytes:

400gbhd.jpg
 
Same with mp3 players, but there it is mb to bytes, so a 512mb mp3 player is actually a about 500mb.
 
You just have to get used to the marketing schemes that they do. Just know that it's never as advertised.
 
^ IBM can't be better than another company. :? It's a number conversion - it's going to be the same no matter who makes the drive or how big it is.

I'm surprised people feel ripped off by this though - haven't hard drive always been like this? I remember my 1.6gig drive on my 100mhz computer being slightly smaller than 1.6. It's just an inherent part of the technology.

Would you complain if you bought a car advertising 200 horsepower and then found out it only had 150 at the wheels?
 
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