why only 18 gigs?

[playdeep]

hey guys....i have a 2nd gen 20 gig ipod. but in the settings...it always says i have 5.2 gigs of 18.55 used. if it is a 20 gig why is it out of 18.55 gigs? thanks...i figure this is a simple question....

[SouthsideIrish]

Because humans think in base 10 and computers think in base two. A kilobyte is actually 1024 bytes, not 1000 bytes, so your 20gb hard drive only has the capacity of 20,000,000,000/1024/1024/1024=18.626GB, and some of that is taken up by the firmware.

Take a look at any of your other hard drives on you computer and you will find that this happens with all of them. I just bought a new 160gb hard drive and only had 149gb of storage to put my data on. BTW This is ####ing some people off so much that they have decided to sue the manufacturers.

Hope this helps,

Bill McNair

[Norman]

It has been traditional in the PC disc market to measure Kilo/mega/giga bytes using base ten although the IEEE and others use a standard of little "k" for kilo meaning 1000, and big "K" for kilo meaning 1024.

Also "b" means bit and "B" means byte)

I worked for Sperry Univac in the seventies (now Unisys) and they always used decimal-based numbers for RAM too. So they sold not 128 KiloBytes but 132 kiloBytes modules for memory.

[Deaddy]

It's a misleading marketing strategy.

[SouthsideIrish]

What "misleading market strategy"? It has always been this way, and probably always will be this way. There is no marketing strategy to it at all.

Bill McNair

[Deaddy]

Most people who don't know about computers would assume its a full 20 gigs as they would appear on your computer and not expect to end up with 18. Selling a 20gig hard drive is more appealing to people than an 18 gig. That's what I mean. I find that misleading.

[DarkJC]

Even Dell advertises drives that way, and people don't seem to care when they buy from them.

Anyone who buys a computer is usually familiar with this.

[playdeep]

well guys.......i am sorry that i was ignorant to this.