UtterlyBoring.com is produced by Jake Ortman (e-mail, resume), a 30-year-old dad, percussionist, freelance Web designer, consultant and jack-of-all-trades computer geek, living in Bend, Oregon. He created this so that his expensive journalism and technology degree isn't getting totally wasted. In addition to editing this site in his free time, he is the IT Director and Ad Designer at both Sunray and Discover Sunriver. He has LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook profiles if you're trying to stalk him.
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Why Does That 500GB Hard Drive Only Have 465GBs of Usable Space?
Here comes the science. This was one of the easiest to follow descriptions of the math behind this and how it's only going to get worse as larger drives come about.
The Dren said on 09/13/07 @ 10:00 AM: This is a silly problem that has gone on too long.
RAM and ROM memory both work on Binary, so 1024 is a Meg, Gig, whatever you want, it works on a binary system.
HDD's work with Memory very closely, so 1MB in RAM should equal 1MB of storage on the HDD.
Classifying the way the HDD MFRs work means that 1MB of RAM is equal to 1.024MB of HDD space.
That is stupid.
Psychotik Mouse said on 09/13/07 @ 11:13 AM: I've personally always considered the SI units to be an approximation of the actual value... 1 MB is approximately 1000 bytes even though the actual value is 1024 bytes, etc. I think it's easier for the layperson to wrap their mind around nice even numbers than the actual values.