My 80GB drive formats out to 77 WTF?

Marbus · Post by **Marbus** » September 19, 2003, 1:28 am

Of course this has been going on for years and it not just limited to Hard Drives...

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=s ... rs_suit_dc

Thoughts?

Marb

Post by **Xouqoa** » September 19, 2003, 10:06 am

Seems silly to me that they are making a lawsuit out of it, but I guess they kind of deserve it. It IS a somewhat questionable practice, but it isn't limited to hard drives either.

Aabidano · Post by **Aabidano** » September 19, 2003, 10:20 am

If you count the SMART space, they might really be getting more drive than they paid for

Vaemas · Post by **Vaemas** » September 19, 2003, 10:31 am

I hope it gets thrown out. Morons like this are why I sometimes hate our legal system. Hard disk manufacturers are measuring a KB at 1,000 while our OSs are measuring a KB at 1,024. You know. That 2^X thing. Anyone with half a brain understands:

20,000,000,000 / 1,000 = 20 GB by the manufacturer
20,000,000,000 / 1,024 = 18.6 GB by the OS

If I remember correctly, most hard disk packaging even states the actual capacity somewhere on the box. Too bad we don't have consequences for stupid people creating stupid lawsuits.

Marbus · Post by **Marbus** » September 19, 2003, 11:03 am

I agree the lawsuit should be thrown out and they should just put a sticker or something explaining the difference. We all know that 1024 is the real number but a great many people do not.

Marb

vn_Tanc · Post by **vn_Tanc** » September 19, 2003, 11:23 am

It's gonna have something to do with the cluster size of the formatting too.
I bet.

Ajran · Post by **Ajran** » September 24, 2003, 2:02 pm

vn_Tanc wrote:It's gonna have something to do with the cluster size of the formatting too.
I bet.

Cluster size is just the minimum amount of space any file will take up.. this was ahuge problem before fat32 on a DOS partition a large drive would have up to a 32k cluster size which meant that any file even a 512 byte file would take 32768 bytes of HD space..

Its one of the things that made utilities like partition magic so popular since it was able to lower the cluster size of the drive on the fly not to mention all the other great partition management features it had. for someone that stored a lot of small data files lowering their cluster size from 32k to 16k or 8k would result in some rather siginificant space savings..