drive sizes

[cast-fish]

hi

can anybody help me with drive sizes?

if i have a completely flat hard drive...(stripped)....then i format it to NTFS and install win32.

When i then boot a RAM OS like tinycore and run gparted.....is the information from gparted
identical to the info that win32 disk manager gives?

say, for example, gparted says that win32 has taken 1.4 gb of the hard drive (used)

will the win32 disk manager (desktop tool of winXP PRO) also report that it's own install has taken 1.4gb....?

thanks

V.

 

[Rich]

Hi cast-fish
Based on the fact that you are asking that question, probably not. If the WIn32 disk manager is treating KByte, MByte,
and GByte as 1000, 1000000, and 1000000000 respectively, it will report a larger partition size, probably 1.503GB.

[cast-fish]

yes Rich

this drive sizes thing is a constant problem for me....it seems totally random
and does not make sense....

so win32 is coded to see a  kYLABYTE as 1000 bytes?...and so on...

so win32 is basically incorrect then....where-as "gparted" will use correct sizes.  (1024)

it's so unhelpful and confusing...(i think even drive manufacturers write 10gb on a drive when
it isn't it's 9.36gb which is what my HDD is)

usually one would not think about these things...until you look at things like TCL at 12 megs
and start to realize how valuable drive space is....so you learn to not waste any but achieving
this efficiency means messing about with drive size issues...

it also happens with pen drives...they are sold as 2gb when they are only 1.89gb....(mp3 player)
so the other day i tried to put CHROME OS onto what was suppossed to be a 2gb pen but ofcourse
it was not....so it did not fit...etc  (chrome was exaclty 2gb)

wonder why this ever became the standard approach to sizes?

V

[Rich]

Hi cast-fish

wonder why this ever became the standard approach to sizes?

That's easy. It's the result of letting one of the marketing monkeys write up the description rather than an engineer.
One day one of the monkeys realized that by using the decimal version of Mega rather than the binary version, they
could put a bigger number in the description than their competition. Of course the monkey was to stupid to realize
that this does not translate into a competitive advantage and would only work once, because the competition
(lemmings) quickly followed suit.

[gerald_clark]

1G is always 10^9.
1Gi is 2^30.

RAM is addressed in binary.
Everything else in decimal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

[bmarkus]

it's so unhelpful and confusing...(i think even drive manufacturers write 10gb on a drive when
it isn't it's 9.36gb which is what my HDD is)

Manufacturers specify the physical capacity. Usable enduser capacity depends on file system, as every file system has some overhead due to administration. Manufacturers do not know which file system will be installed. It's not marketing.

[gutmensch]

Historically looking at all other SI units like KiloGramm, KiloNewton etc. the units KiloByte, MegaByte, GigaByte were wrong since they were computed with 1024 (2^10) instead of 1000 (10^3). So they "invented" KibiByte, MebiByte, GibiByte to name this special "1024" prefix and use KB, MB, GB correctly in its SI meaning (1000, 1000², 1000³) and KiB, MiB, GiB for binary thousand units, but however I personally find the very wide-spread mixture of both unit computations and especially the wrong naming (MB instead of MiB or vice versa) also confusing. And I do believe too, that the main reason hard drive manufacturers adopted the SI units (instead of MiB or GiB, etc.) so quickly was the saving of about 2.5% capacity while keeping the price at the same level So base line is: watch exactly for MiB and MB. I think newer Windows versions name it correctly...

[cast-fish]

so interesting...

i have seen MiB mentioned.....all of this info is new to me...

thanks

V