Hard Drive Capacity: Are Manufacturers Deceiving Us?

[Saint]

40GB? 60GB? 80GB?
Bull****t!
I long time ago had found that the hard drive i bought contains less space that what it claims.
look at this:

A group of computer owners has filed a lawsuit against some of the world's biggest makers of personal computers, claiming that their advertising deceptively overstates the true capacity of their hard drives.

The lawsuit, which seeks class action status, was filed earlier this week in Los Angeles Superior Court against Apple Computer, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba.

The lawsuit brought by Los Angeles residents Lanchau Dan, Adam Selkowitz, Tim Swan and John Zahabian centers on the way that computer hard drives are described by manufacturers.

Representatives of the eight defendants were not immediately available to comment.

According to the lawsuit, computer hard drive capacities are described in promotional material in decimal notation, but the computer reads and writes data to the drives in a binary system. The result is that a hard drive described as being 20 gigabytes would actually have only 18.6 gigabytes of readable capacity, the lawsuit said.

The plaintiffs said this difference in convention is deceptive and leaves buyers with less storage than they thought they were getting when they purchased their computers.

For example, when a consumer buys what he thinks is a 150 gigabyte hard drive, the plaintiffs said, he actually gets only 140 gigabytes of storage space. That missing 10 gigabytes, they claim, could store an extra 2,000 digitized songs or 20,000 pictures.

The lawsuit asks for an injunction against the purportedly unfair marketing practices, and an order requiring the defendants to disclose their practices to the public, restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten profits and attorneys' fees.

Are we cheated by the manufacturers?

 

[BoulderHead]

Are we cheated by the manufacturers?

Well, it depends on what base you are using to count with, base 2 or base 10.

 

[Lyuokdea]

The change comes when the disk is formatted for use by the operating system, I'm not exactly sure why, but I hard drive will come up as 20 GB, but once a formatting system is put on the disk, that would, I assume take up some of the space and leave less space for the usuable information.

 

[russ_watters]

Originally posted by BoulderHead
Well, it depends on what base you are using to count with, base 2 or base 10.

To expand, when using base-2, a kilobyte is 2^10 or 1024 bytes. Same rules for mega and giga. Hard drive manufacturers for some reason (marketing?) all use the standard base-10: 1,000 bytes per kilobyte. When hard drives were a couple of hundred megabytes, the math didn't make too much of a difference. Today, a 100 gigabyte hard drive actually has 100,000,000,000/1024/1024/1024=93.1GB of real capacity.

 

[megashawn]

Its the same thing when you buy a car stereo amplifier. The wattage power in big type on the front is the peak power, or the maximum that it can perform. Your RMS power is actually what is important.

Same deal, slightly different. The advertisement departments are behind this one I'd bet. They could sale you a 93.1gb hd, and tell you its that size, but for one, it would take steps in confusing the general publix, and 2, switching notations and saying its bigger means a larger pricetag.

I suppose that its getting out of hand with the current sizes, but I've learned that pretty much anything is not what it seems.

 

[psionix]

this figure is arrived at by the manufacturer by multiplying the total numbers as follows: tracks x sectors/track x bytes/sector x number of heads, or for drives larger than 8.4 Gb it is calculated as the number of addressable sectors x 512 bytes/sector. when the drive is detected & configured by the system's BIOS and then partitioned, it shows it to be less. remember 1 Mb = 1024 Kb. the manufacturer's rating is derived by using the Fdisk size x 1.07 (for drives >1 Gb) or by using the Fdisk size x 1.05 (for drives <1 Gb).