[X4U] External HD: 750 gig to 699 when formatted. Why???

[Ed Gould]

On Jun 11, 2009, at 8:05 AM, Jens Selvig wrote:

> You have been bitten by 'marketing speak' used by most if not all  
> of the hard drive manufacturers. They report the size of the drives  
> using 1 gig to mean 1000 megabytes while the computer looks at 1  
> gig as 1024 megabytes. So much of the problem comes in converting  
> from base 2 to base 10.
>
> Plus there is a fairly large amount of 'house keeping' space used  
> up on the drive to account for the difference in size. :)
>
> Jens
>


Jens:

Yes this issue has been going on for at least 30 years. The numbers  
are used as sales tactics in the war of $$. The basic issue (as I see  
it) there is no standard and each side will not give an inch. One  
thing that I always ask salesman when they show up is give me real  
numbers not the marketing numbers and I specifically tell them what I  
am looking for. They still do not want to tell you want you want to  
hear so you have to dig around for the real numbers. I do not  
remember when this started but (IIRC) it started in the 1970's .

There is also an issue of definition of MIPS (which is a whole  
different argument) so beware of any numbers that sys MIPS. There are  
so many variables you cannot do a straight comparison no matter how  
hard you try.

The industry likes doing things like this as they can always come  
back and say you didn't do it the way we did so any numbers you come  
up withj are wrong.

Ed