External Hard Drive Size Smaller than Quoted- Not Happy Maxtor!!!

[TheB]

They should sell it as what the OS thinks it is. Let's say you have a recipe that calls for 1 gallon of milk, you go to store buy a container that says "1 Gallon" then realize it's not actually 1 gallon, it's less, but only "because your cup measures differently". No matter if the size is accurate, you still don't have enough to make your damn cake! If you need 300GB to store your files and you buy a 320GB HD, get home and Windows says "Sorry you only have 290GB", you're still F*****.

[bonehead]

regardless of all the situations, auzzie is a small market in a large consumer world, we always still gunna get tha rear end of the deal

[viper831]

laimo says:
Yes, less once formated, but that's not what you pay for!!!

Ok. Your still not getting it. I used my "liter to a gallon" example for a reason.

Forget about formatting.

When you buy a 1 Gigabyte drive, you are getting a 1 Gigabyte drive. ~1099500000000 bytes. There is no misleading, there is no "consumer ripping off" going on. Bits and bytes are different.

Windows shows drives in bits. Therefore when you go to properties, it will show ~879 gigabits. Correct?

Refer to this conversion table. Simply put a "1" under Terabytes, bottom right box, and hit calculate. The numbers on the right are bytes (the number used to advertise the size of the drive), the numbers on the left are bits (the number used to display file/HDD sizes in Windows), although if you do look in properties for the drive, it does display the bytes as well.

Is this now clear?

I'm sorry, but this is completely false. Windows shows drive size in Bytes the same as the drive is advertised. when I bought my last drive it stated TB not Tb. If windows showed your drive size in bits then my TB drive would show up as 8192Tb, because there are 8 bits in 1 byte. The only reason they are not the advertised size is because the manufacturers use decimal and PC all use binary. They consider 1,000,000,000 a Tb when it should be 1099511627776.