ryn004

Why does my 650gb hard disk, only shows 600gb? Note I just formatted it using NTFS.

Semper

Gigabyte - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ryn004

Thanks! That expalins it. Still think that manufactues should advertize what you actually get.

boxst

I don't quite know why hard drive manufacturers confuse GB with 1m bytes apart from the obvious it makes their drives look 'bigger'.

Steve

kernel

I thought the drive manufactures lost a court case in good old USA and had to refund the difference so surprised we still see this discrepancy. Anyone know the full story?

Removed.

It's worth noting that the act of formatting a disk also effectively reduces the amount of space you get to use. For example with NTFS there is a chunk of the disk that is automatically allocate to the MFT, which is in effect the index of what files are where on the disk, then there's the boot sector, on FAT and FAT32 you have the same idea, File Allocation Table.

Don't forget sod's law, the disk you buy today will always be filled by your "art" collection in 6 months time.

As for the Gigabyte versus 1000 x 1000 Bytes, I think as long as it explains it in the manufacturers specs then they get away with it.