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If a car company were to put up a big sign advertising their new minivan had 100 cubic feet of cargo space, but it actually had about 75, doyou think you would have the right to complain? Then why is it we alljust accept the misleading way hard drive manufacturers advertise theamount of space on their drives?
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What I am referring to is the long-standing, misleading practice harddrive manufacturers use to describe the available free space on theirdrives via binary math.
This is by no means a new problem, but I feelit is is an issue that is becoming more and more relevant as drivesizes expand. For example, in the old days, you might have have a harddrive that was sold to you as 40GB, only to find that once installed,you really only have 37.22GB free.
Nowadays, with drive capacitiessoaring, those 3 missing GB might not seem like a big deal, but as harddrive capacities get larger, so too does the the gap between what youread you were getting in your local computer catalog, and the actual specs provided when you do a “Get Info” on the drive once it’s in your Mac.
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I understand that years ago the hard drive manufacturers got togetherand decided that consumers were too stupid to understand binary math,so they decided to start rounding off numbers (and in such a way thatconveniently gave consumers an inflated perception of their drive’scapacity). My point is, they decided this back when drives topped outat around 5 or 10GB. I think that most consumers these days know what adecimal point is, and they could handle seeing a real world numberlisted below a hard drive in a catalog. I honestly would have noproblem buying a Mac that listed its internal storage as 465.5GB.
Heres a detailed blog post ojn the mater:
http://macenstein.com/default/archives/750
Could this be against trading standards? What do you think?
Well it's not exactly the same, but here in the US people always say gas is $2.59 a gallon when it's really $2.599 or in other words $2.60 a gallon. However everybody's used to that so if you know that I don't guess it really bothers you.
I do think a more promenant disclaimer would be good though for less technicallly inclinded people.
There might be no trading violation involved. The discrepancy between listed and actual HDD storage capacities is explained below.
From Wikipedia
Quote:
Operating systems frequently report capacity using the same abbreviations but with a binary interpretation. For instance, the prefix mega can also mean 220 (1,048,576), which is approximately 1,000,000. Similar usage has been applied to prefixes of greater magnitude. This results in a discrepancy between the disk manufacturer's stated capacity and what the system reports. The difference becomes much more noticeable in the multi-gigabyte range. For example, Microsoft Windows reports disk capacity both in decimal to 12 or more significant digits and with binary prefixes to 3 significant digits. Thus a disk specified by a disk manufacturer as a 30 GB disk might have its capacity reported by Windows 2000 both as "30,065,098,568 bytes" and "28.0 GB" The disk manufacturer used the SI definition of "giga", 109 to arrive at 30 GB; however, because the utilities provided by Windows define a gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes (230 bytes), the operating system reports capacity of the disk drive as 28.0 GB.
happens on Ipods aswell. Apparently there 30 gigs. WHen there only 27. Yes yes i know the fact that its only 3gigs but that 3 gigs is worth 2000 songs lol
Yeah I remember being about 9 and buying a new 10gb HD which cost alot back in the day (yep loads of pocket money saving) and then after a while filling it with crap and then being annoyed that I wasn't getting my moneys worth with the full 10gigs.
It's really the way the OS reports the size though, not exactly the manufacturers fault.
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