Lost Space on Hard Discs

Can someone give me a simple explanation for this----
Manufacturers--Maxtor/WD/Fujitsu etc etc., all sell Hard Disks with capacities of >examples--80gbt---120Gbt--- 200Gbt..
When Formated we lose 4Gbt on an 80 HD leaving us with 76Gb---
When Formated we lose 6Gb on an 120 HD leaving us with 114gb.
When formated we lose 11gb on an 200 HD leaving us with 189.92..
WHY the LARGE Disscrepancies between all these HD...Why do we lose more Gbt Space on a larger HD...ARE WE BEING CONNED!!!
Would we be better off buying two 120Gb instead of one 200Gbt!!?
Please Don't give me Binary Figures with all this----Just a Simple Explanation would be Great, So if Possible I can Justify this Great Loss from my New Maxtor 200Gb HD...(This Smells of the BIGGEST RIP OFF in all things made)..

basically, manufactuers make their harddrives as if 1gb=1000000000bytes when in actual fact 1gb=1072741824bytes

computers interpret 1024bytes=1kb and 1024kb=1mb etc. manufactuers, when they tell you their harddisk is a certain size, have gotten that size as if 1000bytes=1kb and 1000kb=1mb etc.

so when the computer says your harddisk is less than you had expected, its because manufactuers look at data sizes in a different way to computers do.

PS. yes, were being conned.

Well, to be perfectly fair, the ISO (International Standards Organisation) definition of a Megabyte uses the decimal 1,000,000 bytes. In fact it is programmers using the binary 1,048,576 bytes that are strictly speaking in the wrong here.

Nevertheless, a class action lawsuit was started in the US against hard drive makers using the decimal megabyte. I haven't heard anything about it for a long while, so I'm not sure what happened in the end.

So the Bigger the Hard Disk, The More Space we Lose at Format.
So basicly, would we be better off buying four 120Gbt HD or two 200Gb HD..
Would/Should the Makers of HD make them 212Gb instead of 200Gb so that we get 200Gb after a Format..After all, we buy 200Gb n that's what we want....
Like Cars/Automobiles in it..A 2litre engine is really 1.98...CON the Public, their Idiots n won't fight us anyway....When Will We Learn!!!!!
THANKS..

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Originally Posted by SuperSparks

I haven't heard anything about it for a long while, so I'm not sure what happened in the end.

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Probably nothing then.

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So the Bigger the Hard Disk, The More Space we Lose at Format.

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yes.

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would we be better off buying four 120Gbt HD or two 200Gb HD..

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(the following arent exact figgures, just made up cos im lazy)

if you have a 100gb harddisk, you lose 6gb
if you have a 200gb harddisk, you lose 12gb
if you have 2x100gb harddisk, you lose 12gb which is the same as having 1x200gb harddisk
so it doesnt mater what size harddisks you buy, the space you lose is always proportional to the harddisk size.

Well, to be fair, you can talk about this any way you wish to, but NOBODY is losing ANY space. It's an unfortunate and confusing issue from a standards perspective, but you're no better off buying two half-size vs. one full-size HD to begin with. Nothing is actually being "lost" here.

This is the very reason that standards were established back in the '70's for stereo equipment mfgs. Previous to this, amplifier specifications were often purposely misstated to overrate the apparent power capabilities of the amp section, so standards were imposed to require power to be listed in a specific manner, i.e. "xxx watts rms from 20 to 20,000 hz with no more than yy% total distortion". If these differences aren't resolved in the computer industry, we'll see some governmental involvement of this nature to impose similar standards.

The way that you should look at it is that Windows underreports the size of your hard drive, not that drive manufacturers are out to "con" anybody. The fact remains that the drive makers are complying with the international standard measurement, and it's very hard to see how they can be criticised for that.

The difference in size has nothing to do with formatting anyway, Disk Management will report the size of a raw, unformatted drive in binary megabytes too.

The question of drive capacity discrepancies comes up fairly frequently, and it doesn't have anything to do with the operating system. The problem is this: In Windows Explorer and other software applications, terms like megabyte and gigabyte refer to powers of 2, while in the hardware industry they tend to refer to powers of 10. One kilobyte in software is 2 to the 10th power, or 1,024 bytes. In hardware it's 10 to the 3rd power, or 1,000 bytes. The discrepancy mounts as sizes go up, as the table shows.

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------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------- BINARY VS. DECIMAL MEASUREMENT -----------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                    Kilobytes    Megabytes        Gigabytes          Terabytes
------------------  ---------  -----------  ---------------  -----------------
Binary (Base 2)        1,024    1,048,576    1,073,741,824  1,099,511,627,776
Decimal (Base 10)      1,000    1,000,000    1,000,000,000  1,000,000,000,000
Difference                24      48,576      73,741,824    99,511,627,776
Percent Difference      2.34%        4.63%            6.87%              9.05%
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Take away 6.87 percent of a drive's stated capacity of 120GB, for example, and you get 111.75GB. If you could purchase a 1-terabyte drive, its actual capacity would be short by nearly a tenth of the capacity it would have had if measured in binary terabytes.

Why "Base 2" instead of "Base 10"? The whole idea behind the operation of a computer is that they are based up working with things that are in either one of two states: A bit is either a "0" or a "1", a gate is either Open or Closed, something is either On or Off, etc., In other words "Base 2".

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2^10 =                1,024 bytes  or  1 KiloByte (KByte or simply KB)
2^20 =            1,048,576 bytes  or  1 MegaByte (MByte or simply MB)
2^30 =        1,073,741,824 bytes  or  1 GigaByte (GByte or simply GB)
2^40 =    1,099,511,627,776 bytes  or  1 TeraByte (TByte or simply TB)
2^50 = 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes  or  1 PetaByte (PByte or simply PB)

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THANKS ALL for your Wonderfull Explanations..I Understand Fully...But would it not be easier for us HUMANS if these Robotic Greedy Manufacturers Made These HDD as a FULLY 120Gb/200Gb..Too Add a few more Bits/Bytes/Terabytes would be easy peasy to them and we Humans would be Happy to Buy a 200Gb HDD n when PC shows it as 200Gb we Would be HAPPY Punters!! YES!

Once again THANKS for the Kind Help...Have a Great Weekend.

But you don't seem to get the fact that by the internationally agreed stanadard they are fully 120GB/200GB drives, and the decimal megabyte used by the ISO is the easiest ones for us humans to use. It's Windows and programmers in general who are using a non standard measurement which makes them appear smaller, and one that isn't so easy for humans to deal with either. I mean, which do you prefer, 1,000,000 or 1,048,576?

Think about it like this, suppose that the fuel tank on your car takes 50 litres, and that's what the pump says when you fill up, but your fuel gauge measures in quarts. It'll only show 44 quarts, but there's still exactly the same amount of fuel in your tank, and you can't say that the oil companies "conned" you because they used a different unit of measurement to the makers of the fuel gauge.

Actually, some HDDs gain in your analysis. My old HP has a "12GB" hard drive but it's actually 13.008,338,944 bytes--a hair over 13GB. It's marketing more than anything else. People don't like odd numbers unless the number has a "ring" to it. Very much like the old cubic-inch wars the auto makers waged in the 1960's; the Ford 289 V8 was actually 286.8 cu.in., but American Motors already had a 287 and 289 sounded good in marketing studies. Another example--Chevy's SS396 was actually 402.+ cu.in. by 1970, but 396 sounded better and didn't freak out the car-insurance companies. Yes, it's misleading, but I doubt anyone stayed up late at night deliberately planning to con the buying public. I'll bet if you checked every hard drive in production you'd find a few rounded down from actual storage capacity. (Maybe.)