The hard drive storage capacity ripoff rant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

Does anyone else think it's a blatant ripoff that hard drives are sold based on their gigabytes being one billion bytes? Even though computers make a gigabyte to be 1024^3 bytes? Therefore we're getting 93% of what we're paying for. I know this is old news, but it makes me sick. I wonder what would happen if the hard drive manufacturers were to be challenged in court (or if anyone has ever tried)?

There's always a small print saying how they define one mega- or gigabyte, so I don't think you'll gain anything (except probably headache and empty wallet) in courts. It's just one of those things we have to live with.

Barney

IIRC dont quote me on this, it was the French that didnt like the idea that 1024 Bytes was 1K and 1024K was one Meg so they proposed to change it to 1000bytes is 1k and 1000k is one Meg. As you would have guessed everyone just laughed and continued as they were, unfortunately it seems hard-drive manufactures being greedy opted for the french method as it means smaller drives can be sold as bigger drives.

Well, I'd be more worried at how long it takes for them to deliver a hard-drive.

I remember someone telling me (when I worked as tech support for Compaq) that HD's were measured in Gibabytes which is basically what you are describing. The Gibabyte being a marketing term for "It seems a lot, but it's actually not."

> I wonder what would happen if the hard drive manufacturers were to be challenged in court

Nothing. Since it is clearly (usually in small type) listed as being measured the way it is, and so far there is no legal naming standard for such things. Of course if it is not clearly listed there may then be a case.

(US of course, other countries may actually have some law that covers this)

A gigabyte is over a billion bytes, isn't it? Oh, you're saying the harddrive comes with only a billion and not the full giga?

This was a bit rubbish in the old days when 80Mb wasn't really 80Mb but now drives are so huge id doesn't really make much difference.

I realise it's in small print, but it's still basically deception, since once you get it into its practical usage i.e. on a computer, the computer measures in 1024 rather than 1000. There is no usage a hard drive can be put to which measures in 1000.

I think it's accurate.
Whoever decided to pretend to be using metric when it's really not was a very bad person.

My point exactly. Let's duff him up.

Sure there is. Each unit on a harddrive takes up 4096 bytes (in NTFS anyways). So you can have 1.000 of those. Anyway, Giga litterally means one thousand million. It's not harddrive manufacturers fault that computers can't count to 1000.

This was adopted years ago so, the makers said it was so consumers would find it easier to buy the size they wanted as most wernt tech geeks who knew it was actually 1024.

Technically, the difference is even greater now, since when you're dealing with gigabytes you have one additional x1024 multiplication, so the "real" bytes are even further away from the "advertised" bytes...

But yeah, it's kind of a scam... Until a couple of years ago they didn't even print the "one gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes" disclaimer.

There were some attempts to redefine a megabyte to mean 1 million bytes everywhere (and what we know as a true megabyte, 1024*1024, supposedly would be called a MebiByte (MiB). Gigabyte would be renamed to GibiByte (GiB), etc. Needless to say, this never caught on and the only ones referring to a gigabyte as a billion bytes are the marketing drones.

but consider a 400Gb drive, which can be found for little over a hundred dollars if you look around -- 400,000,000,000 vs. 400 true gigabytes, or 429,496,729,600 bytes -- that's a difference of almost 30 billion bytes