I bought an acer 500 gig ehd the other day and plugged it in and it only had 465 gig on it.....what happened to the other 35 ??

There was about 200mb of files and an acer organising thingy...but that it ??

Is this the norm ??

A scam ??

a ripoff ??

Sigh....this really should be a sticky.

HDD manufacturers measure using SI decimal units. I.E. one gigabyte is 10⁹ bytes (1 000 000 000). Windows, and their filesystem, uses the 'gigibytes' which defines a gigabyte as 2³⁰ (1024³ or 1073741824). Obviously since the rational way of figuring it is smaller than Window's way, you lose ~7% space per gigabyte. 93% x 500=465.

Is this right or wrong? You're talking hardware and software. Using common sense it would seem to be that sticking with 10^x is a great way to define physical properties. Using base2 for defining software makes sense since that is what they use.

Edited June 1, 201214 yr by dave_boo

Edited June 1, 201214 yr by MJCM

Thanks.

But thing is...I still thought I was buying 500gig......just not fair.

You did buy 500GB of space. There are things you can do to utilise it, but then you lose your broad compatability...plus you would have to use an OS that you wouldn't like.

Yes, 8Gb usb sticks are really only 7.4Gb.

If you are using windows, you can compress your data to store more stuff on your [465Gb} HD.

Connect your HD, click 'Explorer' (usually second button from left in lower panel), R-click on your HD, L-click on 'Properties', then tick the box that says 'Compress this drive to save disk space', AA

Thanks...shall give a go.

They should advertise them as 465gig ehd's then really.