Hard drive rip-offs...

Having just read the thread started by nottynut, regarding his lost 8Gb of hard drive space, it led me to thinking...

If a "40Gb" hard drive is equal to 40 x 1000 x 1000 x 1000 = 40 000 000 000

and

40Gb is really equal to 40 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 42949672960

... then surely hard drive manufacturers are breaking the law.

Here in the UK we have a legislation called "The Weights and Measures Act, 1985", which was introduced to protect consumers from being ripped-off when purchasing items, ensuring they were the right size, weight, or volume.

If I am right, then surely the like of Seagate, Maxtor, and IBM shouldn't be allowed to continue to falsely advertise their products...? :confused:

...anyway, just a thought.

K-Line

here in the USA we have several laws on false advertising,
but what companies are doing is not false advertising it is just manipualtion.
they are advertising 40gigs with their definition of a gigabyte
they are not using the actual 1024 measurement
it is merely a lack of standardization
soon enough the byte, kbyte, megabyte, ect
will be set a specific standard but until that hapens
i can say my hard drive holds 800 gigabytes, because i define gigabyte as about 50 megs
in the end it is just interpretation of the fact

Manufacturers usually print "their" definition of a gigabyte on the box (ie 1000x1000...)

Ammo

PS: I think I remember reading a post here about diffrences of the computer vs scientific definition of sizeing prefixes which could justify the use of giga as 1000x1000x1000...

Yup... there it is (from Negative):
http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=124340

Ammo

wait till you start adding in the factory tolerances for bad sectors....
(I hear technicians all the time, telling me every drive had bad sectors... strangely enough this is not true)

On consumer end products, especially hard drives you see a lot of this, the tolerances from the factory for what is sellable are quite easy. Have you ever wondered why even Compaq's higher end storageworks market is still pushing 9.1's and 18.2's.... even though theyre manufactured, you dont really see too much marketing push for the 36.4's....

of course not, Compaq covers their business end with an insanely good policy, they dont push the larger drives because they are more failure prone, the tolerances for bad sectors and such are much stricter from the factory, and the size specification is closer to true scientific (they too unfortunately are off by a couple of bytes, but less than most).

Not that I'm pushing as a compaq advocate, IBM does the same for their business end.... but then again the pricing is higher because of this.

Yes, most components are cheaper now, especially at the consumer end. The business products are still highly priced, but worth the extra $$ simply for the reliability and support in my opinion.

but then again, it still pisses me off that my 40 gig hard drive from CompUSA isnt really 40 gig, and will probably die within two years of installation...

what can ya do......

~THEJRC~

what the heck!

1024b = 1mb
1 gb = 1000mb
40gb = 400000mb

so what's wrong with this stuff???

The problem is nobody ever made a legal-holding definition of a giga/mega-bytes. It's like a company saying their product is 50% fat free. That doesn't mean that 50% IS fat, it's just one of those things that nobody really knows about that is just an *indicator*. I mean, it would be rediculous to expect a down-to-the-ones numerically-precise number.

I think the International Standards Organization is pushing for two different scales. Megabytes and Gigabytes, etc, would be on scales based on powers of TEN, whereas Mebibytes and Gibibytes would be on powers of 2...

In other words, one uses 1000-fold differences between prefixed-measurements, the other uses 1024-fold differences. Nobody ever really laid down the law on which one was correct, AFAIK. It's just a marketing thing, it sound more impressive using the 1000-fold definition.

The solution? Look carefully on the box or call the company and ask!!!

Quote:

---

Originally posted by protocool
what the heck!

1024b = 1mb
1 gb = 1,000mb
40gb = 400,000mb

so what's wrong with this stuff???

---

40 * 1,000 != 400,000
40 * 1,000 = 40,000

1 gb != 1000mb !

1 kb = 1024b
1 mb = 1024kb
1 gb = 1024mb
40 gb = 40,960mb

The reason for the difference is pragmatic.

it's a lot easier to calculate with scale 10 than with 2.

Code:

---


 3
2  = 1 byte

 10
2    = 1024

 20
2    = 1024 x 1024 = 1048576

 30                                      9
2    = 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1.0737 x 10

---

the last calculation is the real size of 1 000 000 000 (giga) bytes, in bytes
so it's a lot easier to use the simple calculations:

1000 b ~ 1Kb
1000 Kb ~ 1Mb
1000 Mb ~ 1Gb

And if you want a drive of let's say 8Gb buy one which states on the label 8.4 GB
the same goes 72 Gb --> 73.2Gb ...

How bigger the drive how more the difference in calutation will show up and how more 'space' you will lose.