Hard Drive Manufacturers are cheaters
Ok, so Hitachi and Seagate both announced hard drives with sizes of 1 TB (or possibly bigger). But how can they say 1 TB when it’s not really 1 TB at all? Hard drive manufacturers have been overstating the capacity of their drives for years. They are the only people who define “1 MB” as “1 million bytes”, “1 GB” as “1 billion bytes”, etc. (see for example the small print in http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_internal_sata.pdf). I doubt that the TB drives will be any different. So what happens is that you will go and buy one of those fancy new 1 TB drives, put it in your computer, format it and then the OS will tell you that you really only have a 931 GB drive - because the OS calculates it properly - where 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes.
See also this Wikipedia entry:
As of 2006, most consumer hard drives are defined by their gigabyte-range capacities. The true capacity is usually some number above or below the class designation. Although most hard disk manufacturers’ definition of GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes (however, computer memory has a natural inclination towards units that are powers of 2), most computer operating systems use the 1,073,741,824 byte definition. This distinction can be a cause of confusion, especially for people from a non-technical background, as a hard disk with a capacity of 40,000,000,000 bytes would have a reported capacity of only 37.4 GB.
[ via neuerdings.com, CrunchGear & Endgadget ]
Posted in: Uncategorized | January 5, 2007 8:40 am
1 Comment »
Free Hard Drive Eraser Guy, on April 12, 2007 @ 1:02 pm
This is my first comment over here. I like this blog a lot.
I liked this blog entry the most though, the way you said it was just amazing!
See ya Later
P.S. - CSS update?
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