Work out the true Megabytes for Gigabytes.

Hi Paul,

thats the correct formula - MS justs like to be different

So 1029 would appear greater than 100.

Youll see a greater difference if you use an SSD
500GB converts down to about 490 usable

Roy

Confusion on this matter comes all the time (there are many posts on the forum about this) and the answer it's always the very same: Microsoft got it wrong from day 1 and there is a (minor) bug in Windows that still exists.

Problem is that Windows displays decimal sufixes everywhere (kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, etc.) that imply multiplyng by 1000, but does the math for them in binary units (kibibytes, mebibytes, gibibytes, etc.) that multiply by 1024, hence there is a small difference in each and every size calculation.

The correct calculation is 100 x 1024 = 102400 MiB, but Windows will wrongly show 100.00 GB (when it should show 100.00 GiB), the bug is that it displays the wrong unit, but the calculation will still be correct.

I don't get why you added 10x8 thing, that will add a bit over 100GiB, but being so small it will be rounded. Also 102900 is somewhat bigger and might show a very small difference.

Anyway, may I ask why it's important to have an exact size?

torchwood

Thanks Roy, it is appreciated.

Alejandro85

Anyway, may I ask why it's important to have an exact size?

When I do things I like them to be exact and correct. If I want a partition to be 100 GB I don't want it to be just over or just under what I have specified. No more than that really. I am probably being a bit anal about this but there is a LOT of discussions on the net trying to get to a difinitive answer to this question.

Thank you both for your answers.

Be aware that there is some rounding in drive specifications. Drives are not manufactured to have exactly the advertised capacity. The actual capacity will be somewhat more or less. Two drives from the same manufacturer with identical published specs may have been manufactured in different countries with significant internal differences, and with different capacities. It appears that this is particularly common with some removable devices.