Flash Drive Capacity

[Eye7]

Hey guys,

I have an 8gb patriot flash drive. I've just formatted it in Windows 7 and it states:

7.46gb free of 7.53gb

nothing is on the drive, so why isn't it 7.53gb free of 7.53gb??

Says 66.5mb are currently in use....but I don't see anything in it!

 

[Eye7]

Nevermind - Had to run a format, no quick format...but I lost .2gb! :-P

 

[defaultluser]

Flash disks are sold like hard drives, where 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes.

1,000 bytes = 1 KB
1,000,000 bytes = 1 MB
1,000,000,000 bytes = 1GB

Traditional interpretation of a GiB is 2^30, or 1,073,741,824 bytes.

1,024 bytes = 2^10 = 1 KB (now known officially as KiB, but nobody says that)
1024 * 1024 = 2^20 = 1 MB (now known officially as MiB, but nobody says that)
1024 * 1024 * 1024 = 1 GB (now known officially as GiB, but nobody says that)

Windows interprets your drive as the traditional way, because it is easier for programmers to work with powers of two than powers of ten. So Windows sees your 8 GB drive as the following:

8,000,000,000 / 2^30 = 7.45 GiB.