External Hard Drive question

[Tsunulia]

I just bought a Maxtor 300 gb external hard drive for my comp. I hooked it up and went into my windows explorer to check if everything was all good. When I see the drive memory space, it says I have 279 gigs OF 279 gigs available. Is this to be expected or I have I been jipped 21 gigs?



*kinda ticked*

 

[Kable24]

Mine says the same thing.

 

[CConn]

It's really a bit of shifty advertising employed by, well, everyone. For some reason (I haven't a clue why), byes are measured differently than gigabytes, so, for example, I have a folder that's 1.35 GBs in size, but in bytes, it's 1,454,362,624. So, technically, your hard drive does have 300,000,000 bytes, but that translates to only 279 GBs.

 

[Mr Kris]

This is something that is generally confusing to the average computer user;

First, the prefixes kilo-, mega-, giga- really mean, in SI (international system of measure, "systeme international in French"), x1000 (10^3), x1,000,000 (10^6), and x1,000,000,000 (10^9) respectively. So when you see "300gb," in SI, it techincally refers to 300,000,000,000 bytes of data.

However, in common computer usage, the multiplier is not an exact 1,000 for each order of magnitude. In computer usage, each order of magnitude is 1024 times the previous (or 2 to the 10th power). So for example, while 1 kilobyte technically means 1000 bytes, in common computer usage it is 1024 bytes.

To avoid this confusion, someone came up with new prefixes for the computer world; 1024 bytes is 1 "kibibyte" (kilo- binary byte). Abbreviation would be KiB. The corresponding unit for a computer gigabyte is a "gibibyte" abbreviated GiB. So your hard drive is technically a 300gigabyte hard drive, but in gibibytes, it's about 279 which is what you're seeing. The "kibi" unit of measure isn't really in widespread usage yet though.

Hopefully that cleared some things up instead of confusing you more....

 

[Tsunulia]

^ That makes sense, but I never heard of the kibi before.

 

[Malice]

yup, that is exactly right.

Also, remember, oit 300GB BEFORE you format it, less after you format it.

 

[MichaelDigital]

That's perfectly normal.

 

[Edward Brock]

So your hard drive is technically a 300gigabyte hard drive, but in gibibytes, it's about 279 which is what you're seeing.

Actually, it's the other way around. The drive is advertised to be a 300 Gigabyte HD, but in reality, it is a 300 Gibibyte drive which translates to 279 Gigabytes.


Confused already?

 

[Spelunking Man]

Actually, it's the other way around. The drive is advertised to be a 300 Gigabyte HD, but in reality, it is a 300 Gibibyte drive which translates to 279 Gigabytes.


Confused already?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix