New
#1
hard drive sizing rort
I don't know about you guys, but I build computers pretty frequently, and it really irritates me that consumers do not get what they pay for with regards to HDDs and their capacity.
I remember working for years to build my first PC - and the HDD was 320gb, and I was super excited. Although, on completing construction of this monster of the day, I realised the capacity of my HDD was in fact closer to 299gb, and I wondered... Why?
I made some calls and did some reading and I did not like what I found.
We all know (or should know) that computers are built on binary data (1s and 0s) that are organised into bits (single data) and bytes (8 data), and that octal's equivalent grouping of the decimal 1000 is 1024. Thats why a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes etc.
So a 2TB HDD, in theory, should be 2048GB, right? Well... no.
Manufacturers produce HDDs on a decimal scale. KB, MB, GB and TB are made and advertised, by manufacturers, as units of 1000.
Computers continue to (And will always) group bytes in units of 1024, which means the end consumer pays for what they're not getting.
As HDDs get bigger, the difference becomes more noticable.
My 2TB HDD is, in fact, showing up in windows as 1.81TB.
So my question is, why do manufacturers get to advertise for what they're not giving you? Why is a 1.81TB HDD not advertised as such, and why is nobody doing anything about it?