Hard Drive - why is 2 TB only 1.8 TB ??

whs said:

Right now my thermometer shows 45 degrees - but it is just misleading me because in my reality it is 7 degrees - because I am a European and I only know Celsius. This is the analogy to your misconstrued arguments.

I recognize validity in your view on the matter and appreciate your comments.

Thanks,
James

whs said:

Right now my thermometer shows 45 degrees - but it is just misleading me because in my reality it is 7 degrees - because I am a European and I only know Celsius. This is the analogy to your misconstrued arguments.

Fortunately, whs, most people are aware of the difference between Faernheit and Celsius temperature readings. There is little ambiguity to be found in this arena.

Conversely, when it comes to gigabytes, there is still much ambiguity. Whether that is perpetrated by the HD manufacturers and computer sellers or they have merely taken advantage of it, the reality of the ambiguity remains.

Certainly, for you and me, and many others here on these forums, we see no ambiguity. The general computing public does, however. Hence, the reason for the queries about "where did my GB's go?"

mikedl said:

whs said:

Right now my thermometer shows 45 degrees - but it is just misleading me because in my reality it is 7 degrees - because I am a European and I only know Celsius. This is the analogy to your misconstrued arguments.

Fortunately, whs, most people are aware of the difference between Faernheit and Celsius temperature readings. There is little ambiguity to be found in this arena.

Conversely, when it comes to gigabytes, there is still much ambiguity. Whether that is perpetrated by the HD manufacturers and computer sellers or they have merely taken advantage of it, the reality of the ambiguity remains.

Certainly, for you and me, and many others here on these forums, we see no ambiguity. The general computing public does, however. Hence, the reason for the queries about "where did my GB's go?"

Ok we all here know the difference between GB (base 2) and GB (base 10).

But my BIOS can interpret a USB device differently (true) if it's less than or greater than 2GB. My USB memory stick has 2 GB written on it even though it's 1.86GB (base 2). How will the BIOS treat my memory stick?

I gave my son a (WD) 500GB portable as part of his Christmas present and on the bottom of the box it defines what it means by GB (= 1 billion bytes).

This topic is becoming quite circular in nature.

My response wasn't circular. We're all bored silly with explaining the two interpretations.
The serious point is:
When it needs to be defined it needs to be explicitly defined. Read my BIOS example.

Sorry, mjf, I meant no offense.

My point was that most of the general computing public is not aware of the base 2 math that is used in Win 7 and then wonder why their HD manufacturer puts a different number on the description of their HD compared to the number Win 7 displays.

We do keep running in circles regarding this topic, with all due respect.

As far as your BIOS, well, that's not something the average user ever pays any attention.

And, around it goes.

]

whs said:

LOL, on another forum last year, a Canadian lady even wanted to take the manufacturer to court for false advertising. We had a hard time to keep her from doing that.

And that means this lady is right! It is fundamentally wrong from the beginning of computer media manufacturing and I think it is just a dirty trick! There would be nothing wrong to take manufacturers to court about this IMO!
Of course you can tell me that manufacturers are actually right because MB and GB are multiplies of 1000 and only GiB and MiB are multiplies of 1024. Oh yes one can say we are all noobs and don't understand it, but that would be just closing your eyes before the world. Have you ever seen MiB or GiB being used in operating systems or programs?? I almost never had. That means it can be written in some wikipedias that there are MBs and MiB, however in reality it is simply not true and HDD manufacturers simply live in a paralel world :-\