Is 16GB really 16GB ?

Hi,
I have recently bought a Corsair 16 GB Flash Drive which I use to make disk images and I must say in tandem with Macrium Reflect Free disk imaging and restore utility it does a great job. I have noticed however that whatever software reads the Corsair it only shows as having a capacity of 15.05 GB and not the stated 16 GB.
Is this normal or have I been short changed ?
Regards Alex

 

This is normal. The stated 16GB is the capacity of the raw unformatted disk. When you format a disk, the partition and the file system always consume some space leaving you with what ever is left, in your case 15.05GB of usable space.

 

Hi, Cheers. It had me wondering.
Regards Alex

 

there also is two different ways of figuring out the size of a drive/partition.

say you have a drive that is 1,000,000,000 bytes. a typical way to look at that is to just drop 0's and call that 1 terabyte drive. 1000 bytes = 1 kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes = 1 megabyte, 1000 megabytes = 1 gigabyte, 1000 gigabytes = 1 terabyte. But that isn't the "correct" way of figuring drive size. everything is a factor of 1024, not 1000. A small but significant size difference, because now our 1 TB drive is now a 953 GB drive.

 

@Burning_Monkey, Yeah, I left that part out. Every time I drag out that little point I get a lot of confused looks from the people I'm trying to educate......:confused

 

yeah. some times I enjoy those confused looks though

I just tell people that computers are binary systems which means that everything has to be "perfect" factor of 2 and 1000 is not a perfect factor of 2.

I also astound people by being able to count to 31 on one hand but they really don't like when I show them 4 :roflmao

 

Yeesh, I hear ya. 0 and 1, simple as that. If you really want to get people to bug out, drag out the bits, bytes and nibbles and try and explain that to them!:-D.... I teach an intro into computers course at a vocational center.