Hard Drive Size

[Klowinns]

Hi,

I just purchased a hard for my laptop of 60GB and when installed etc. it appears as 55 GB. What could be the cause?

Thank you for your time.

 

[Orr]

Thats normal, the effective size is always lower than the advertised size.

 

[Klowinns]

Thank you..

 

[Bullitt]

A bit more specifically, its the marketing department getting more say-so than the engineers.

Both are correct, but here's the low-down.

For a HDD manufacturer, 1 GB = 1 Billion bytes. Now to someone who uses a computer, 1 GB = 1073700000 bytes (2^30th). a HDD package that advertizes 30GB really just has 30 billion bytes on it. When you slap it into your computer, it actually only has 27.94 gigs. Now you have to format the drive and you lose another few megs for the filesystem, etc.

What you are experiencing is a combination of the differences between decimal and binary and minus a few for the formatting. Purchase that 500gb drive and watch it only have 465gb (minus some for formatting) and you get frustrated really quick.

 

[Tigerbiten]

Its the difference between counting in binary & decimal.

60 GB = 60x10^9 = 60,000,000,000. <- Marketing
55.87 GiB = 55.87x2^30 = 59,989,955,707. <- Computer
They are the same number but one looks bigger than the other.

But it works in you favour when counting ram size.

Luck.........