Storage Drives, Why Are They Cutting Sizes?

[ResidentEvil7Participant 9547]

Ever notice that when you buy a flash drive, blank DVD, or a hard drive, they never give you the full capacity? I mean my 500GB computer only gives me 451GBs (where did the other 49 gigs go); a 128GB flash drive only gives you 119GBs (where did the other 9 go), and a 4.7GB DVD lets you burn 4.3 gigs. I always wonder if there’s a legit reason why they don’t give you the full size, or is it some kind of scam? I never understand why they never give you the storage amount they say it has.

https://themanszone.webs.com/

[ChuddoxParticipant 585]

So…short or long answer?
Short answer is the space is there, but its used by other things.

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” - Robert E. Howard

[ChuddoxParticipant 585]

so the long version is that this space is used for things like drive partitions. This is software formatting that tells the drive how to hold files, access them, and what types of files it can hold. To think of it most simply, imagine you have a box, with an internal area of 144 square inches, but this box doesn’t have a shelf to hold things on. So you add a board to your shelf that is 2 inches thick and 12 inches long, or 24 sq inches. well now that this shelf is in the square box, it takes away from the available internal space. so no, no matter what your 144 in square containment area now permanently has 24 less sq inches because those inches are taken up by the shelf. Same thing with Storage devices effectively.

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” - Robert E. Howard

[hellraiderParticipant 2837]

there is also a difference between size in powers of two and in powers of ten.

A kilobyte is 1024 bytes.
drive manufacturers advertise 1000 bytes as a 1 kylobyte aka 1024 bytes.
here, its only 2,4% of a difference, but, you see, 1 giga byte is 2^30 bytes and that is a 7,3% difference to 10^9 bytes.

and the rest is space “lost” in the file system.

[Anonymous 42]

So is fragmenting like a shelf that was emptied leaving the wood behind? like empty boxes randomly placed in a stack full of full boxes? Is De-fragmenting like removing the empty boxes? Just wondering?

[EekParticipant 1162]

Anonymous wrote:

So is fragmenting like a shelf that was emptied leaving the wood behind? like empty boxes randomly placed in a stack full of full boxes? Is De-fragmenting like removing the empty boxes? Just wondering?

When you save a file to a hard drive the OS and device driver are configured to store files in certain size chunks, for example 1KB. So no matter what, a file will be at least that minimum size.

For bigger files, most old spinning magnetic disk drives would generally try to write files as one continuous block for faster recall later. Sometimes though, there isn’t space to put the data all together so pieces of a file are put where there is space. On magnetic drives this is a performance hit because the reader head then has to move to read the whole file. It is even worse when loading a lot of different small files.

When you ran defragmentation tools they would actively organize the files on the disk to be continuous or sometimes even reorganize small files to be blocked together if they are frequently accessed at the same time.

With modern solid state drives this isn’t an issue because there are no moving parts. Reading one file at the “front” of the drive and one file at the “back” doesn’t take any longer than reading two files right next to each other. And on SSDs the reads are much faster.

[XSDBSParticipant 3598]

hellraider wrote:

there is also a difference between size in powers of two and in powers of ten.

A kilobyte is 1024 bytes.
drive manufacturers advertise 1000 bytes as a 1 kylobyte aka 1024 bytes.
here, its only 2,4% of a difference, but, you see, 1 giga byte is 2^30 bytes and that is a 7,3% difference to 10^9 bytes.

For example:
My laptop’s hard drive is (advertised as) 1 terabyte (1 TB).
multiply by 1000 four times to convert to bytes…
TB1
GB1000
MB1000000
KB1000000000
byte(s)1000000000000 (1E+12)

Then, divide by 1024 to get the “actual” sizes…
byte(s)1000000000000 (1E+12)
KB976562500
MB953674.3164
GB931.3225746
TB0.909494702

Windows on my laptop reports drive capacity as 931.39 GB.

[RennieParticipant]

File systems do take up some of the space for their own needs. This will be more noticeable on a complex file system like Hammer2, ReFS, ZFS, BTRFS.

I never found any storage device that was exactly as advertised.

[AttonParticipant]

I never understand why they never give you the storage amount they say it has.

No it’s just the way the OS calculates the size of the drive, I’m pretty sure their are a few videos on this.

A MGTOW is a man who is not a woman's bitch!

[ResidentEvil7Participant 9547]

It’s all still just wrong, like scam-wrong. When I buy a 1TB drive, I want all 1TBs, not 931GBs. Basically it’s false advertisement.

https://themanszone.webs.com/

[experiencedParticipant]

If enough men demanded “net storage capability” as opposed to “gross storage capability”?

Like telling the car salesman, “ALL references to total price henceforth will include EVERYTHING, if you later try to tack on anything, I walk.”
Demand the statistics in numbers that matter to YOU.

"It seems like there's times a body gets struck down so low, there ain't a power on earth that can ever bring him up again. Seems like something inside dies so he don't even want to get up again. But he does."

[Anonymous 42]

ResidentEvil7 wrote:

It’s all still just wrong, like scam-wrong. When I buy a 1TB drive, I want all 1TBs, not 931GBs. Basically it’s false advertisement.

Like air enriched emulsified ice cream! How come my triple decker cone weighs less than a candy bar? And what’s with these 1/2 gallon containers shrunk down 12oz but are a spitting image of a 1/2 gallon? Everywhere I look I see trickery! Especially in the governing of nations!

[ResidentEvil7Participant 9547]

ResidentEvil7 wrote:

Just like a bag of Doritos. Why do they only give you a half a bag? Just like with storage media, it’s all a scam. They want you to pay more and they give you less and less with each size increase.

https://themanszone.webs.com/

[Dr. SableParticipant 1064]

Hard drives like processors often are rated for a particular size.
Not all are identical from what I have read. I can live with a 2% discrepancy
but after that I would start to think , what am I paying for.

Zero Tolerance

[ResidentEvil7Participant 9547]

And another thing I like to know is, why won’t the flash drive allow me to put any file higher than 4GBs on it? I tried to transport a 6GB MKV file, and it said it was too big to transport over. That makes no sense.

https://themanszone.webs.com/

[hellraiderParticipant 2837]

because the flash drive is formated in some old filesystem residentevil7.

the 4gb limit is typical of a 32 bit adress space, remenber, 2^32=4gb.

try to format your drive in ntfs.

[ResidentEvil7Participant 9547]

I have a 64-bit Windows 7, and my flash drive is formatted in FAT32.

https://themanszone.webs.com/

[ResidentEvil7Participant 9547]

hellraider wrote:

try to format your drive in ntfs.

NOOOOOO!!!!! I did try to format it to NTFS, and after putting on a 9GB file, the Blu-Ray player would not support the flash drive. I tried to undo the format, and then I formatted it to exFAT, which also ended up being not supported. I was really scared right there, because I thought my $200 512GB flash drive was ruined. I had to go on YouTube to see how to format it back to FAT32. I had to download a software from Microrit Products, which was very slow to do it, install it and use that for format it back to FAT32. I got my flash drive back to FAT32 and it does once again read onto the Blu-ray player as normal. So thank God I found that YouTube video, or I and my $200 loss would be one VERY p~~~ed off guy. I won’t do that NTFS or exFAT thing again. Yes it does allow you to transport files over 4GBs, but if you can’t play it on your player, then it wasn’t worth it. I’m sticking with files under 4GBs on FAT32 and not worry about that anymore.

Thanks for trying to help me get large files onto my flash, but it ended up not working and causing me a lot of worries.

https://themanszone.webs.com/

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