S1rst

Ive just bought a 512mb memory card for my phone, i put it in and it says 452mb? Seems a bit strange? Do they all have less than stated?

richj

the start up programme probabally takes some memory?

foreverwhite

i wouldnt worry it is perfectly normal.

Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

That is quite normal with storage media.

My 200gb Hard Drive only actually has 185gb available.

Incidentally, I bought a 1gb USB Drive for Ł7.99 including postage from Play this week. Thought that was pretty cheap.

foreverwhite

play.com do indeed have some good deals, including cheap phones.

cozmeister

iTrader: (1)

The capacity shown on memory sticks and hard disks is always less than what they state. Has been from the beginning of time

This is due to some of the space being reserved for the File Allocation Table (or whatever the device uses as an equivalent), and for the disk's layout.

Imagine taking a football field, and having to divide it up into 6, but having very clearly defined boundaries for those 6 so that no-one can miss the gaps.

The football field has an area of X square metres. Some of that area goes missing to allow, for example, a 1 metre wide walkway/gap between the 6 areas - the same thing with memory sticks and hard disks so that they can find the information you've asked for.

They also reserve a (relatively) small amount to hide bad sectors should they develop.

S1rst

Ah right cheers.

cozmeister, good explanation that mate, i can see exactly what you mean.

Ade

Its a bloody rip off... I recently bought a 500GB hard drive and it came up as having something like 430GB avaiable!

I know why it does this but why not just call it a 430GB drive if that's all I'm ever going to be able to use of it?!

S1rst

My thoughts exactly mate as strictly speaking not all the 512mb is available or in your case 500gb.

cozmeister

iTrader: (1)

Because in the very small print it says xGB unformatted, so when it leave the factory, blank, it can hold xGB of data. The problem is that some of it isn't available to the end user but is used by the drive, ergo it's a xGB drive. Gotta love loopholes, eh?

And, different filing systems have different overheads, so if you formatted it with NTFS, you'd have a different usable capacity to FAT32, for example.

From a marketing point of view, manufacturers assume the average Joe won't know the difference and the higher the number and lower the price the more value Joe thinks he gets for his money. On average you'll lose between 10 and 15 percent of the unformatted capacity to the filing system and disk layout.