Why!?!?!

Decimal Deception - This week I got a 200 GB hard-drive for my primary PC. When Windows 2000 booted up, it found a new 186 GB hard-drive. Where did the missing 14 GB go? The truth is it never existed. Western Digital is using marketing lies to fool the consumer. Below is some information that isn't found anywhere on the outside of the box, but it is mentioned inside the installation guide.

...the capacity of the hard drive can be reported in either decimal gigabytes (where 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes) or in binary gigbytes (where 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes).

Decimal Gigabyte? That's marketing lingo for let's screw the consumer because most people forget that 1 K is 1024 bytes, not 1000 bytes. The WD rep on the phone claimed that other hard-drive manufacturers do the same trick. Great! When hard-drives were smaller this discrepancy probably went unnoticed or was too small too complain about. As hard-drives get larger, the differences between the decimal size and the TRUE binary size will widen and so will customer dissatisfaction.

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diggingforgold said:

Its not actually a measurement, but rather, one uses binary, and another uses decimal measurements.

A decimal megabyte = 1,000,000 bytes (10 to 6th power)
A binary megabyte = 1,048,576 bytes (2 to 20th power)


So- windows uses DECIMAL (appears smaller), and Hard Drive Manufacturers use BINARY (appears more). Binary is actually more precises. Decimal is kind of like rounding.

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NookieN said:

Listing network transfer rates in bits instead of bytes makes them appear less pathetically slow.

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not actual quote summarising mostly

Reader: Recentl y i though i had purchased a 120 GB hdd when i got i tplugged in it only had 111 GB what gives?

Maxpc: This isnt a nwe issue.It comes down to hwow you define 1 GB. Windows uses one def. while hdd manuf. uses another. A hard drive vendor said "hard drives use gigabytes or 10 ^10. MS uses GIBIBYTES and labels them as gigabytes. MSs gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 , thus it subtracts seven percent according to TIST, 120X10^10 divided by 1073741824 = 111.7 gibibytes, NOT gigabytes as MS would have you believe. According to NIST 1 gb is 1,000,000,000. Further quoting NIST "once upon a time comp pros noticed that 2^10 was nearly equal to 1,000. And started using ISU prefix kilo to mean 1,024. That worked out well enough for a decade or two because everyone who talked kb knew taht the term implied 1024. bytes. But almost overnigt a much broader "everybody" owned comps and the trade computer pros needed to talk to physicist and engineers and even to ordinary people most of which who knew that a kilometer is 1000 meter and a kilogram is 1000 grams.

"then data storage for gigabytes and even TB became practical and the storage devices were not constructed on binary trees which meant that fofr many practical pourposes binary arithmatec was less convienient than decimal arith. The result is taht today everybody does not know what the MB is. When discussing comp memory most manuf. use mb to mean 2^20=1048576 bytes but the manf of some comp storage devices usually use the termp to mean 1,000,000 bytes. Similarly some designers of LAN use megabits per second to mean 1048576 bit/s but all of tellecom. engineers use it to mean 10^6 bit/s or 1000000 bit/s. And if two definitions of the MB are not enough , a third MB of 1024000 bytes is teh MB used to format the floppy disks. the confusion is real as is the potential for incompatibility for standards and in implimented systems.

Isnt this the same problem that sent mars probe hurtling into the planets surface? Damn you metric system!


BLAH BLAH

more info on this confusing topic is available at

http://physics.nist.gov/ccu/units/binary.html

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William said:

Just multiply and divide by eight as needed. Not a big deal.

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DarkJediSleikas said:

This is the correct answer.

For almost the same reason, HDD manufacturers measure hard drives in decimal gigabytes rather than binary gigabytes.

The conversion factor between these two isn't simple.

2^(10n) binary bytes = 10^(3n) decimal bytes

where n is a positive integer. (n = 1 for kilo, 2 for mega, 3 for giga, ....)

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Nevandal said:

I think people would accept if you explained it to them...and then advertised them in binary gigs.....and your download speed showed as kiloBYTES.....they would understand.

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Dunno how much parity is used anymore, but after stating communication speeds for over 10 years in Kb/s, people just tend to keep things the same.

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