| Forum Home | ||||
| Press F1 | ||||
| Thread ID: 91073 | 2008-06-25 05:24:00 | Misleading in Marketing Drives | nzwaikato (10381) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 682322 | 2008-06-25 05:24:00 | Even though I understand the reasons why my 320GB hard drive only shows up as 298 GB on the computer (because 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes or something like that). I can't help but feel a bit miffed about it. If a company is going to advertise a storage medium as having 320GB the joe blogs user would expect to have 320GB of space to use. Maybe it should come with a warning label for those of us who aren't up to date on the technical reasonings. Or maybe they should just advertise them as 298GB and save us all the confusion. :) |
nzwaikato (10381) | ||
| 682323 | 2008-06-25 06:17:00 | It says on the packaging that this will happen. It did when I bought my external HDD. There usually are notices and warnings telling you that the way the manufacturers measure capacity and the way your OS does is different. | beeswax34 (63) | ||
| 682324 | 2008-06-25 06:40:00 | As a side note, you can calculate the actual capacity by using this formula: Marketed Size in GB / 1.024 / 1.024 / 1.024 |
jwil1 (65) | ||
| 682325 | 2008-06-25 08:16:00 | Ah now that I think about it, the sales staff cut the drive out the packaging when I brought it (was travelling so didn't need the extra bulk). Thanks for the response | nzwaikato (10381) | ||
| 682326 | 2008-06-25 09:31:00 | Sigh............it doesn't. Open Windows Explorer. Right click on the drive letter and choose properties. Now take a look at the size reported on the far left. See?????? |
pctek (84) | ||
| 682327 | 2008-06-25 12:58:00 | Hi At first look, this does appear to be some slick marketing from the Manufacturers of Computer Hard Drives and RAM. The real reason however, is not one of technical difficulty but rather that of Mathematics. Binary, to be precise. At the risk of boring the hell out of yah, Computers work like a switch. Either, the electronic logic is on or off. In Binary, this is represented by the digits 1 or 0. The value of each doubles in size so the series are 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 512, 1024 and so on. Some of these numbers will be familiar to anybody who uses modern electronic (digital) gear. How about 512 MB of RAM, or maybe a 512 MB Mp3 Player? Still with me, great!! Remember, 1024 byte = 1kB 1024 kB = 1MB 1024 MB = 1 GB 1GB = 1024^3 =1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1073741824 byte I applaud the Manufacturers who explain the differences on their packaging, long may it continue. BURNZEE |
Burnzee (6950) | ||
| 682328 | 2008-06-25 13:17:00 | And if you buy this antiwrinkle cream it will make you look younger in two weeks. I should have got some earlier. | Sweep (90) | ||
| 682329 | 2008-06-26 00:08:00 | Thanks for the maths Burzee, I'm sure a lot of us already knew that but for those less familiar I would just like to point out that while you showed the maths for actual GB you forgot to mention the maths of how the marketing companies work it out. They use the decimal version of MB and GB which is simply 1,000,000 and 1,000,000,000. it's easy to see why this works out to a bigger number with each MB & GB being smaller than the binary version windows uses. However as crooked as it may be to deliberately use the wrong method to get a bigger sounding capacity, they are using a valid definition which is why they get away with it. There were people a while back pushing for the two standards to have different abbreviations to distinguih them, which is why you'll sometimes see MiB & GiB which was a propsed way of showing the difference |
dugimodo (138) | ||
| 682330 | 2008-06-26 00:43:00 | Even though I understand the reasons why my 320GB hard drive only shows up as 298 GB on the computer (because 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes or something like that). I can't help but feel a bit miffed about it. If a company is going to advertise a storage medium as having 320GB the joe blogs user would expect to have 320GB of space to use. Maybe it should come with a warning label for those of us who aren't up to date on the technical reasonings. Or maybe they should just advertise them as 298GB and save us all the confusion. :) Ii think it is worse with things such as ipods. They stich 30Gb on the back of the ipod, but it is only about 27GB. Sure the have warnings about this, but I would have thought it would be better to advertsie it as having less than it actually has. |
robbyp (2751) | ||
| 682331 | 2008-06-26 01:41:00 | For goodness' sake, get over it! | feersumendjinn (64) | ||
| 1 2 | |||||