I have a question or better yet need confirmation. I just bought a 500g external hd, and it says that i have 465 free space, which means that the other gig's were taken up by something else.. could this something else be the preinstalled programs? but i mean over 30 gig's were needed? Sucks. But im just wondering.
How-To Geek Forums » Windows XP
External Hardrives
(11 posts)
whs-Very confusing!If you convert decimal to binary (HD) and get a 93% difference with binary being the smaller figure,why is 1G of ram actually 1024 megs or 1.024G with binary being the larger figure?And to further confuse,when people talk of 20G download speed,is that number binary or decimal?My thinking has to have a serious flaw.Maybe a web site recommendation (this is called leaving ones self open)?
I never said 1G is 1024 megs. I said 1K is 1024 bytes. But if you want to do some studying, here you have a whole selection of webpages http://search.aol.com/aol/sear.....pe=msie70a Take your pick.
Most like to market and advertise the one that sounds bigger than it actually is (you know it was a guy who came up with that way to describe the size of his hard drive) and actually get away with it.
Here is an old post on this topic with the explanations http://www.howtogeek.com/forum.....replies=44
And here is a chart that makes it all crystal clear.
http://xkcd.com/394/
Since the post that Budohorseman referred to is very long, I have taken the liberty of copying the essential entry from ScottW for your convenience: I hope ScottW does not mind.
"It's the old GB vs gigabyte. If you look on any modern hard drive box, you'll see in fine print where they say GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. But, for computers a gigabyte is 2^30 = 1,073,741,824
So, if we take your 120 "GB" (120 billion bytes) and divide by 2^30 (1 gigabyte) we get 111.758, hence 111 gigs. Jack's 160 GB is 149.011 gigabytes.
For storage, remember that GB != gigabyte.
EDIT: I should have mentioned that a GB is 10^9 -- that makes it easier to punch into your calculator. You could also save the conversion multiplier, 10^9 / 2^30 = 0.931 to make it easier to compute the next time. You could also factor out the power of 2 from the base 10, but it doesn't make things easier. Man, I had a lotta math in school."
i think i forgot to mention that i suck at math, mind you i work for the claims dept at an insurance company and half the time we have to figure out how the claims were processed and where we applied the member's benefits and percentage and stuff. sucks, but in the end it's all money, which i do know how to do. I really dislike that portion of the job, me and numbers had a fight a long time ago and we havent reconciled. I REALLY DISLIKE NUMBERS, too bad we're always surrounded by them.... but i get it though, between the decimal and binary, thanks you guys!!!
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