When will it end?

The incorrect labeling of hard disk capacity is getting rediculous. i bought a 160 GB disk last week that only shows up as about 150. That's a full 10GB shy of what I payed for! How long are the HD manufacturers going to carry on with this?

What happens when the first terrabyte drives become available? Will they really only hold around 900GB?

Is there one company that manufactures hard drives to spec?

I notice that the USB thumb drives are following along with this labeling scheme.

 

I've never seen a HDD that didn't explicitly state "1 MB = 1,000,000 B" or "1 GB = 1,000,000,000 B" several times on the package and in the specs.

This confusion is precisely why the computing industry is gravitating towards the new IEC prefixes. The SI prefixes are confusing since both are technically correct.
KiB = Kibibytes = 1,024 B (2^10 B)
MiB = Mibibytes = 1,048,576 B (2^20 B)
GiB = Gibibytes = 1,073,741,824 B (2^30 B)

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

 

Oh my goodness, i didnt realise that!! So actually, most of the stuff on my HD isnt in megabytes but mebi-bytes... but is a mebibyte 1024 kibibyes?
Oh im so confused now

 

Actually since when using the computer, 1GB is 1024MB, not 1000MB, that error carries forward and therefore multiplies out when calculating the size, and so you get a "gap" at the end where the manufacturer made 1GB = 1000MB for each gb on the drive.

Plus the fact you have reserved sections too they arnt usually 10GB big though

 

Yeah I understand the reason why it shows up that way. And it hasn't alwsys been standard proceedure. Remember 300MB hard disks? I think it is soomething they started doing when hard drives started getting bigger than 10GB and they figured they could save a few bucks. Why did we let them get away with it?

The discrepency will be mind boggling as file sizes become larger and larger.

 

Well, I remember 20 MB HD. Also consider that the capacity they advertise is generally the unformatted capacity, which is also higher than what you'll actually see.

 

Right.

Of course. 1 Kilobinarybyte (KiB) is 1024 bytes. One Megabinarybyte (MiB) is 1024 * 1024 bytes, which is the same as 1024 KiB.