just wondered if someone could tell me why a 500gb hard drive is reported as 465gb under winxp
i know this happens, just wondered what the reson was

Smoke and mirrors, its because its not really a 500gb HDD.

they just round it up, like my 120 gig hdd is really 115 gig.

nope... its because of all the 8 bits in a byte thing....

i cant remember how they do it, but its something like, theres only 8 bits in a byte but they count it as 10 bits to a byte ?

500GB is counted in thousands. windows counts in 1024s. (2 to the power 10)

1000 kilobytes in a megabyte, 100 megabytes in a gigabyte, but theres 1024 bytes in kilobyte & not 1000, 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, etc.
All those bytes that are rounded down all adds up.


Since there are actually 1024 bytes in a kilobyte etc, and this is what the computer will use:

500000000000  % 1024 %1024 % 1024 = 465.66GB

but manufacturers divide by 1000
500000000000 % 1000 %1000 % 1000 = 500GB

bits to a byte = 8
bytes to kilobyte = 1024
kilobytes to a megabyte 1024
megabytes to a gigabyte 1024

Nobody says that though... everyon says 1000 in a megabyte & 10000 megabyte in a gigabyte,etc.













own up.. who entered 500000000000 %1024 %1024 %1024 into a calcualtor?

its daft that they are marketed as 500gb then of they are only 465gb
surely 500gb should be 500gb!

It was originally marketed as such for the people that couldnt add/didnt know how to calculate it, now they simply label it "overheads" or some tripe.

Quote from: crazylegsits daft that they are marketed as 500gb then of they are only 465gb
surely 500gb should be 500gb!

The difference between Decimal and Binary my friend

Quote from: crazylegsjust wondered if someone could tell me why a 500gb hard drive is reported as 465gb under winxp
i know this happens, just wondered what the reson was

Nothing to do with XP.

Its the manufacturers rounding off the numbers.  In the future they may not be able to after certain legal changes.

Quote from: CypherIts the manufacturers rounding off the numbers.

No its not, its the difference in binary and decimal, as stated by M3ta7h3ad, Eggtastico and myself.

Quote from: crazylegsits daft that they are marketed as 500gb then of they are only 465gb
surely 500gb should be 500gb!

As has been stated before manufacturers use decimal sizes while everyone else uses binary. Effectively its a fix, but there isnt much you or anyone else can do about it.

There is also an overhead for the formatting.

Quote from: Maldonado

Quote from: CypherIts the manufacturers rounding off the numbers.

No its not, its the difference in binary and decimal, as stated by M3ta7h3ad, Eggtastico and myself.

Youve just agreed with me.

Quote from: Cypher

Quote from: Maldonado

Quote from: CypherIts the manufacturers rounding off the numbers.

No its not, its the difference in binary and decimal, as stated by M3ta7h3ad, Eggtastico and myself.

Youve just agreed with me.

Erm, no, i didnt. If you cant see how wrong you are then Ill just leave you to it.

the partition table takes up a bit of room to IIRC or that could have been the old myth meh