"dooger watts" wrote: Have read that there's a ten percent loss off the actual 500gigs in formatting--but this seems pretty standard. The advertised space on the 250 claims that, formatted, there's slightly MORE than 250 gigs of space, so maybe they're packing a 280gig drive in there--or else they're lying.
-- I suspect this might be related to data storage definitions commonly applied (but in my view, unethically applied) by HD vendors. The colluding vendors apply decimal, as opposed to the binary definitions which are recommend by the ISO/IEEE (and other standards organizations) and which are traditionally applied when measuring RAM and other primary computer storage media: Base10 (decimal): 1000 Bytes = KB; Base2 (binary): 1024 Bytes = KB; So when measuring a GigaByte the difference can be calculated by subtracting 1000^3 (to the third power) from 1024^3. Same issue applies to defining a MegaByte, TeraByte, and on it goes. As you can see, the larger the hard drive the more a HD vendor will over-represent the actual (vs. available) disk storage space (but the percentage diff remains the same). I guess it could be worse. The HD vendors could have colluded on redefining a Byte as 7 bits. ;-) (Also note with Windows the over-reporting issue can be exacerbated by slackspace overhead issues due to Windows WinOS FAT-based format schemes which create large clusters... this issue becomes even more pronounced when storing many small files). Regards to external storage solutions for consumer (at least for Win installs) I have observed a high degree of satisfaction using Maxtor One Touch products. But they still are unable to measure your blood glucose. And it's worthy to note with each Maxtor (and Seagate) internal hard drive you now receive a free copy of Acronis True Image for imaging internal and external hard drives. The imaging software can be used within Windows but best to run from a Linux based boot disk which the True Image application will auto create for you. _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
