External hardrive

Timmy_d

Not entirely windows related but i bought an external hardrive 300GB,but its only allocating 280GB to me,could it be something to do with the manufacturer or anyone enlighten me?

feylya

Hard drives don't have the specified size available. It's to do with how they're formatted. 280 is all you're going to get.

Timmy_d

Why dont they format so as its 300 and not 280 as it says when buying? 20GB is alot

feylya

It's to do with peoples ideas of what a kilobyte is. Manufacturers call it 1000 bytes and windows calls it 1024 bytes. They're trying to change that though so manufacturers have to specify how much space will be available when it's formatted.

seamus

Timmy_d wrote:

Why dont they format so as its 300 and not 280 as it says when buying? 20GB is alot

Hard drives capacities have always been done in 1000 bytes = 1 Kilobyte. So when a manufacturer says that a drive has a capacity of 300GB, that's 300 billion bytes. Whereas in an OS, 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes. So 300GB in that notation is 322,122,547,200 bytes.

280GB sounds about right.

mathias

They're trying to change that though so manufacturers have to specify how much space will be available when it's formatted.

Actually no , "they" are not , the manufacturers have been using correct terminology all along in that SI ( thats systeme internationale ) standardised prefixes long before there were hard drives and kilo = 1000 , mega = 1000000 and so on , and that is the way it is and the way it will stay.

Saying kilo = 1024 is incorrect and is a common abuse of the SI system , suffice to say that the computer industry and the operating system that reports your capacity using these "binary" prefixes is not using standardised units and is incorrect !!

The manufacturers are now and always have been , using the correct numbers.

By the way , its got nothing to do with formatting , the issue here is that one side , the manufacturers , are using standardised prefixes with definite and unchanging values , and the other , the computer industry and OS software developers , are hijacking these prefixes and saying they mean something else ,

To compare , if I have 1500 euros , and somebody comes along and says I have 1000 sterling , I dont go complaining about the missing 500 do I ?
Thats because I know there are two different systems in operation here , the same amount of money but two different evaluation systems.

Its the same with hard drives , the same amount of space and two completely different evaluation systems which because of the computer industry's abuse of terms , people think are the same and they are not.

The computer industry uses a base of 2 and powers of two but insist on using SI terms which are not now and never were meant for binary.
In actual fact , the correct standardised terms for binary are

KiB which is short for kilo binary
MiB which is short for Mega binary
Gib which is short for Giga binary
etc.
But OS's will insist in using the SI terms of Kilo , Mega , Giga, causing confusion about " missing " hard drive space when in fact its the terms that are misused , there is no missing space , the same way there is no missing 500 above!

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html

Kevster

It's also to do with the way files are stored in the different slots on a disk. A lot of redundant space is left that cannot be used by other files.

Kevster

It's also to do with the way files are stored in the different slots on a disk. A lot of redundant space is left that cannot be used by other files.


Is 280MB not enough!

Tivoli

It's nothing to do with the way files are stored in the different slots on a disk. or about the redundant space left that cannot be used by other files




its about the 1000 vs 1024 mentioned above

mathias

It's also to do with the way files are stored in the different slots on a disk. A lot of redundant space is left that cannot be used by other files.

No ... it absolutley is not , see above , as I said , there is no missing space , just two completely different counting systems.

Timmy_d

Kevster wrote:

It's also to do with the way files are stored in the different slots on a disk. A lot of redundant space is left that cannot be used by other files.


Is 280MB not enough!

hmmmm some mixed reactions i see haha...280 MB is enough its just something i noticed and wanted to see what it was about

Kevster

If that's not the way they're stored then I'm already out of date with what I learned many years ago!!!

...back to the classroom for me.

mr_disc

Timmy_d wrote:

...280 MB is enough

I hope you mean gigs here

Tivoli

Kevster wrote:

If that's not the way they're stored then I'm already out of date with what I learned many years ago!!!

...back to the classroom for me.

files are stored pretty wastefully alright, but we're talking about "the drive size that windows sees" vs "what the drive says it is"

your talking about adding the size of all the individual files on your pc and comparing them to the ammount of space they take up on the drive