You know what really pisses me off...

[ds dude]

When you go out and buy a 1 TB external hard drive and when you get home you find out it only gives you 931 GB. Ok I know I should be picky but that is a 69 gig difference that's total bulls**t. Please someone enlighten me on this. I found this on a topic on google which explains why: "1TB drive doesn't actually give you 1TB of storage space, but 930GB. That's because 1TB unit the companies that produce them is actually 1 000 000 000 000 bytes. Computer units are 1 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes."

It made me feel better now that I learned something so please if you're pissed off at anything just kindly leave it in this thread so your hatred can slowly die away with this topic.

[Fireman]

it's '11

m8

you should do some more research, as it's everywhere.. (internet, 12mbps, mega-BITS; smaller than  12 MB/s mega-BYTES and lots of more examples..)

as for the topic:

>***gots trying to get airplane ticket in aus by cc

lolno

>declined

[jrgp]

It's due to the filesystem formatting, not the drives geometry/dimensions.

Filesystems vary in how much usable space is available vs how much is reserved for the inodes/journal/metadata.

For ex, on linux, jfs and xfs provide more usable space than ext3/ext4.  It has nothing to do with the drive, so don't bitch at seagate or whoever.

[Furai]

People, what do you talk about? It's just commercial gimmick...

• T=10¹²
  
• G=10⁹
  
• M=10⁶
  
• k=10³
  

While true IT units are:

• Ti=2⁴⁰=1024⁴
  
• Gi=2³⁰=1024³
  
• Mi=2²⁰=1024²
  
• Ki=2¹⁰=1024
  

So one 1TB is something different than 1TiB.
1TB=10¹²B=931,322574615478515625 GiB

It's just a matter of prefixes.

[ds dude]

Alright thanks for clearing that up.

[FliesLikeABrick]

Seagate and probably WD and others got sued for their misleading use of mega versus mebi and giga versus gigi or whatever.

So that's not really part of the cause anymore afaik (though they might still be saying it's 1 terabyte, but then in fine print on the box say "and 1 terabyte is actually 10^12 bytes).   It is moreso because of what jrgp said - the filesystem formatting.  filesystems have overhead, because they need to store data about where your data is and how to find and assemble it.  That takes up a small percentage of the space on your disk.

If you want to reduce that, reformat the drive using a larger block size (default is usually 4K).  This is fine if you have mostly large files on your drive, but at a certain point you actually lose space because partial blocks cannot be used - meaning that if a file or the remaining amount (file size modulo block size) is apperciably small compare to the block size, you end up wasting space there.

so generally, larger block sizes don't gain you much unless the majority of your drive is used up by files at least a few hundred times whatever block size you use.  the math is simple and helps you identify what block sizes might be useful for you versus which ones aren't.  I wish I could reformat my large RAID array to a larger block size but I don't have anywhere to put all of the data temporarily

[KYnetiK]

No, what pisses me off is that noone seems to take the overhead into account - why not just increase the total memory proportionally so that there is 1 round figure of usable memory + the overhead?

ie when I buy a 1 terabyte hard drive, it should really be a little BIGGER than 1 TB so that with a file system the user still has 1 terabyte of usable space

[DarkCrusade]

Why is it that important to have exactly one terabyte, unless you have a porn that big in size?

[{LAW} Gamer_2k4]

Why is it that important to have exactly one terabyte, unless you have a porn that big in size?

Same reason that when you buy a twelve-pack of soda, it's important to have twelve sodas inside.

[echo_trail]

Why is it that important to have exactly one terabyte, unless you have a porn that big in size?

Same reason that when you buy a twelve-pack of soda, it's important to have twelve sodas inside.

+1up

[jrgp]

Why is it that important to have exactly one terabyte, unless you have a porn that big in size?

Same reason that when you buy a twelve-pack of soda, it's important to have twelve sodas inside.

If they wanted to make sure you always had 1TB of usable space, the drive would have to be a completely different random size and they'd have to target a specific file system. Then what happens when you switch OS's and using a different file system? You might have much more or a little less than 1TB of usable space.

You can't just make the drive 1204GB and hope it's 1TB in the case of most file systems, because each gives you a different percentage of usable space and you can often change that, as FLAB said.

Using things in real life like soda packaging and marketing to compare to computers is retarded, imho. But I wouldn't expect much more from someone who exclusively uses Windows and is never exposed to things like changing block sizes and filesystems other than ntfs/fat.

It's better to just make the drive exactly 1TB and leave it up to the filesystem to provide ample space.

[KYnetiK]

jrgp - my point is that no manufacturer is interested in pleasing the consumer.


Making a 1204 GB drive would still mean 1TB of usable space for a MASSIVE proportion of consumers. Is this not an improvement? Do you want to pay for 200+GB that you cannot use without being a computer scientist? Maybe it was all well and good when we thought in megabytes, but its just ridiculous that when dealing with gigabytes and terabytes we still have not moved past this.

When a consumer wants a product, the manufacturer produces it, strips it back so its no longer what the customer wanted, then sell it with accompanying packaging that actively advertises that it is still what they wanted if not better. Only after surrendering currency and voiding the warranty can the customer truly observe the fallacy. This is not how people should allow the market to operate when the manufacturer made the CHOICE not to meet consumer expectations when they clearly have the technological and economic capacity to do so.

Its just how Coke can afford to freely deliver clean drinking water to every person on the planet, but choose to spend 3X that amount on a single year selling bottled water instead, or that Monsanto can afford to ensure starvation is a thing of the past by the weeks end, but chooses its own profit over proactivity. Companies cannot be held liable when they sustain an apathetic consumer base.


If companies werent so keen to place as much misleading or use the lowest forms of advertising to appeal to people, I probably would agree with you more jrgp. When I buy blank discs, I can actually fit the same amount of data on there as advertised - with everything else its a theoretical maximum that cant actually be achieved if you want to use it. Am I the only person who sees the redundancy of advertising a product with properties that cant be achieved if I used it for its purpose? If humans are so highly intelligent, they should have considered a smarter way by now of dealing with file systems than consuming the memory its supposed to be maintaining, but Im a cynical hack so I guess I just expect too much from  the 'highest order of life'.

[DarkCrusade]

@KYnetiK: A lot of words for 69 GB.

[KYnetiK]

If you cannot look past quantity to reveal content, then obviously language is already lost on you. Do us a favour and be an a**hat somewhere worthy of your surplus energy, please.

[{LAW} Gamer_2k4]

Seagate and probably WD and others got sued for their misleading use of mega versus mebi and giga versus gigi or whatever.

So that's not really part of the cause anymore afaik (though they might still be saying it's 1 terabyte, but then in fine print on the box say "and 1 terabyte is actually 10^12 bytes).

Uh, it's still part of the cause.  It's almost the entire cause.  Putting a disclaimer on the box doesn't change the drive's size.

It is moreso because of what jrgp said - the filesystem formatting.  filesystems have overhead, because they need to store data about where your data is and how to find and assemble it.  That takes up a small percentage of the space on your disk.

Given ds dude's original post, I'd imagine that percentage is almost negligible.  He said the computer showed him 931GB.  That's exactly 1 trillion bytes.  If there IS file system overhead, it's not showing up.

Oh, and for the rest of you, it's 1024, not 1204.

[DarkCrusade]

If you cannot look past quantity to reveal content, then obviously language is already lost on you. Do us a favour and be an a**hat somewhere worthy of your surplus energy, please.

It's 69 GB we are talking about. I was ridiculing you, because there is a huge difference between a DVD (lets say 5GB) and a HDD (1TB). I am not saying having 69GB less is great, but I am saying "why would I care?"

Because seriously, when I have files as big as 931GB, 69GB won't make the difference between buying a new HDD or not, because after all, you have filled 931GB of space, and whoever gets to such a huge amount is going to need even more space.

Now go ahead and throw another wall of text against me. I said this much with a short sentence, because I almost always keep my stuff to the point not to bore people. I am just explaining this to you so you can understand my reasoning behind trolling you for the effort you make. No offense was meant.

[a-4-year-old]

You can't just make the drive 1204GB and hope it's 1TB in the case of most file systems,

You can when you ship the drive formatted to fat32, knowing that anyone technical enough to change it themselves is also technical enough to understand a resulting fluctuation in drive space.

[deguix]

Better to have -69 GB than having the full amount without formatting (-> can't put or access files| no organization). I'm also sure that companies find easier to make 1TB rather than 1TB + 70GB.

[{LAW} Gamer_2k4]

Why the heck would anyone ship a terabyte drive formatted in FAT32?

[jrgp]

Why the heck would anyone ship a terabyte drive formatted in FAT32?

They wouldn't, because FAT32 completely and utterly sucks.