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

ignatzatsonic said:

James Colbert said:

It strikes me that 'integrity in marketing' would dictate listing the 'user usable capacity' on the box.

Is there some valid reasoning behind this?

James

The reasoning is utterly valid.

"Integrity in marketing"

A non sequitur if ever I heard one and surely you jest.

Marketing 101 states that if 4 is good, then 5 is better.

If a 100 Watt stereo system is good, then surely a 200 Watt stereo system is better. Witness any audio retailer advertisement.

It follows that if 1000 is good, then 1024 is better, if .9313 is good, then 1.000 is better, and if 465 GB is good, then 500 GB is better.

Ad vomitum.

The measuring method is used because it is thought to be effective---a certain unknown percentage of rubes would shy away from a drive advertised at 465 GB and buy the adjacent drive measured at 500 GB, even though they have the same usable capacity.

The measuring method will be abandoned when it is thought not to be effective or when it is outlawed. Neither are on the horizon.

Can you imagine WD adopting the measuring method that yields 465 GB while Seagate continues to use the method that yields 500 GB? It won't happen as long as WD believes the rube census is greater than zero.

An appropriate assessment, I think. IOW (if I might 'boil it down'), profit driven, as suspected. But what's interesting is that today's world considers this 'valid reasoning'. I myself still consider such behavior corporate greed.

James

Buddahfan said:

[Actually...

Thanks for a thorough response, Buddahfan.

James

James Colbert said:

An appropriate assessment, I think. IOW (if I might 'boil it down'), profit driven, as suspected. But what's interesting is that today's world considers this 'valid reasoning'. I myself still consider such behavior corporate greed.

James

I'll grant you that it is not a particularly easy pill to swallow and subjects us all to the worst aspects of human nature, but in the absence of "profit driven", we would be using an abacus at best. Otherwise, why would anyone get out of bed?

Pick your poison.

I can remember a few years back when, at the bottom of each ad flyer offering HD's and computers for sale wherein HD capacity was mentioned, there was a disclaimer about the actual HD capacity. It's been a while and I no longer see such a disclaimer. Another interesting tid-bit related to this topic:

So where did the missing gigabytes go? Were they used by formatting? Nope. Did the hard drive manufacturer lie? Nope, but they did exploit the ambiguous definition of "gigabyte". What can you do about it? Nothing, really; just be aware of the difference between advertised capacity and actual capacity.
Note that different operating systems label things differently. Mac OS X 10.6 actually uses the SI definition of a gigabyte, so your 500 GB (advertised) drive will be listed as "499 GB" or even "500 GB". Windows uses the term "gigabyte" to refer to a gibibyte, et cetera. Linux and Unix usage varies, but Gnome uses the marking "GiB" to avoid ambiguity.

link ...

Dwarf said:

Because the binary versions of these prefixes are larger than the equivalent decimal ones, we get this apparent discrepancy between the advertised disk capacity (which is the decimal value) and the actual capacity as reported by the computer (the binary value). Both values are correct, in other words 500GB = 465GiB. It is just marketing convention that dictates that disks are sold with the decimal equivalent of their capacity, afterall 500GB looks better than 465GiB even though they are both the same capacity. Incidentally, even floppy disks were subject to this marketing. They were sold as 1.44MB although their reported capacity was just 1.38MiB.

Apologies to all for the delayed response. Thanks, Dwarf, for what I think is an accurate and objective response. Can't get much clearer than that.

ignatzatsonic said:

I'll grant you that it is not a particularly easy pill to swallow and subjects us all to the worst aspects of human nature, but in the absence of "profit driven", we would be using an abacus at best. Otherwise, why would anyone get out of bed?

Pick your poison.

It doesn't have to be one or the other. I'm not against profit at all. I just believe that principle should play a guiding role. When it does, everyone wins.

whs said:

James, what do you want then to do? it is 2 billion or 2 trillion bytes in both cases. You want them to put a huge number on the box? If someone who works with a computer does not unerstand binary, I am sorry. We had to work in Hex - now that is really fun.

Hi whs. No need for huge numbers. Real world numbers will do.

I guess what I'm saying is that (as a matter of principal) hard drive manufacturers should mark their products using the same 'math' that the OS's and thus real world users are subject to. They would have to do nothing more than market the drive size as '466 GB' rather than 500 GB.

James

whs said:

Sorry, but this quote was written by a retard. This is completely ridiculous.

ambiguous definition of "gigabyte

The truth is that it is ambigous (not the math, but the marketing usage). At least to the public. Otherwise, there wouldn't be the constant barrage of 'I'm missing 40 GBs' threads.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I do think the line (along with its contextual text) is accurate, at least in part. To think that drive manufacturers don't recognize the marketing aspect of this is to call them idiots, which, certainly, they are not.

James

whs said:

Sorry, but this quote was written by a retard. This is completely ridiculous.

ambiguous definition of "gigabyte

Explain SI units and the way Mac OSX reports the size of an HD then, whs.

I would proffer the meaning of a gigabyte is definitely an ambiguous term as the general, non-computer public sees it. Apparently, HD manufacturer's have taken advantage of this fact. Well, I guess, unless one owns a MAC.

The fact we're still discussing this is a poignant indication of the inherent ambiguity regarding gigabytes in the way HD manufacturer's report HD capacity and the actual capacity realized depending on the OS one uses.