July 21, 2008
Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
Maxtor has an odd way of computing hard disk space... so I lost 7% of mine.
I don't generally blog about hardware, but this time I got really upset at Maxtor (although I think this practice of fooling consumers is quite common). Due to a failure in the cabling and the connector of a recent external Iomega drive I bought 3 months ago (I hope to be able to save its content, but this is another story), on Friday I went to a local computer store asking for a replacement cable... and after checking it didn't help I bought a new external drive on the spot.
I found a Maxtor portable hard drive relatively cheap and as I trust the producer (compared to others I had never heard of) I went for it. There was a prominent sticker on the box saying "250 GB", matched by a minimal description on the back. So I was quite surprised when, after hooking it to my laptop, I was told that the disk has 250,056,704,000 bytes, which is about 232 GB. So I lost 18 GB, which is about 7%. I mean, this is not a huge difference, but I hate being treated by vendors like this.
17 Comments
Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
Marco, This has been standard practice since the first PC was sold. While memory is measured in actual KB (1024 bytes), disk space has always been measured in K (1000 bytes). Therefore, while 1 MB of RAM is 1024K, 1 MB of drive space is 1000K. I'm surprised you didn't knwo this - you've been around computers for quite some time.Comment by Ken White on July 21, 17:22
Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
This is a disk drive maker's "trick" that's upset many in the past and preys on ignorance. In my country Maxtor also have a bad name for quality, overheating and failing. Seagate is the one over here with 5 year warrantees.Comment by johanb [http://fsr.co.za] on July 21, 17:44
Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
Yes, for marketing reasons a kB is suddenly 1000 B. Everything to make it look bigger ;-( It can get worse: tape manufacturers used to sell you 20 MB tapes that actually had a capacity of 10 MB. They just 'predicted' a compression factor of 2 and calculated non-compressed data size. Do they still do that? Remember the software boxes filled with a CD, a flimsy manual and lots of air? ;-)Comment by Jan Doggen [http://www.jandoggen.org] on July 21, 17:50
Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
Do you have a receipt? Give it back. No point to give them money for free. I recently was very pleased with some other alternatives - HD external enclosures. It is up to you then to have the drive. Same USB or Firewire connectivity. In general I do not like bundles, and external drives are the one of them. I think is better to choose an enclosure and a drive as two items then one.Comment by Serge [http://blog.dragonsoft.us] on July 21, 17:58
Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
Ken, this practice is not new to me... but every time I get upset. I don't see why we should accept this "habit". You know when buying a "liter-bottle" of wine it is actually much less than that, but the bottle has the real amount on its label.Comment by Marco Cantù [http://www.marcocantu.com] on July 21, 18:00
Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
The GiB vs. GB distinction is one of many annoying marketing practices that persist. We can be grateful that the manufacturers of RAM and Flash memory have not followed suit. Another interesting post on this subject (from another interesting Marco) may be found here http://marco-za.blogspot.com/2007/11/gb-vs-gib.htmlComment by Jack Crowley on July 21, 19:07
Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
Even more puzzling is two IDENTICAL external drives, WinXP-formatted (not system drives), containing IDENTICAL backup data, reporting different free space values. Seems WinXP reserves a system area which contains data that cannot be seen and which varies in size according to I-dont-know-what-rules. Weird and annoying.Comment by delfi phan on July 21, 19:42
Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
As other people has explained it is a question of GiB (1073741824) vs. GB (1000000000). The marketeers count with the smaller base to claim more GigaBytes on their disk. I have never liked this GiB moniker, but it was introduced as an ISO about 10 years ago, so I guess it is gonna stay. In flash-mem storage (SD card, USB stick, etc.) you will see similar 'lost GigaBytes', but for a different reason. In memory chip business they indeed do use the right GigaBytes (GiB) when specifying sizes, but the controller chip need some of the flash-mem for 'house-keeping', so you typically get 5% less than you expect. E.g. my 2GiB SD card have only 2032271360 bytes total storage space, i.e. 5.5% is used internally. Slightly simplified explanation: The reason is that flash-mem has a limited number of erase operations (something like 50000 times for each block), and you have to perform erase operation when a block has to be rewritten. In order to avoid that one block is worn out long before other blocks, the controller will write a block to another chip address whenever it is updated and mark the old block as 'dirty'. Only when no 'free' blocks can be found a 'dirty' block will be erased and become a 'free' block. The necessary mapping table between logical addresses and chip addresses is stored in the hidden house keeping space. I have earlier written a flash-block mapper as part of embedded system where flash mem chip was used without separate controller chip. Doei RIFComment by Richard Foersom on July 21, 22:48
Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
I partially sympathise but have to agree with others who point out that this is a well known and VERY common practice. What difference would it really have made to have had the "real" capacity printed on the box? What alternatives would you have had? i.e. what manufacturers do you know of that state capacity using "physical GB" as opposed to a "marketting GB"? How do those manufacturers deal with the fact that in any event, actual capacity will depend to a large extent on the formatting of the drive? Everyone knows that a marketting GB isn't the same as a physical GB. Get over it.Comment by Jolyon Smith [http://www.deltics.co.nz] on July 21, 23:58
Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
IOMEGA... I have a really bad experience with its Zip drive... My RARELY used Zip drive was broken and killed all my Zip disks due to the famous Click of Death (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death)... I had too many data on those disks... Since then I never consider buying any more IOMEGA product...Comment by william on July 22, 04:32
Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
Giga = 1,000,000,000 as a standard SI prefix. E.g.: http://www.simetric.co.uk/siprefix.htm I'm sorry you didn't get what you expected, but this has been the standard practice for a long while. DavidComment by David Taylor on July 22, 09:44
Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
"This has been standard practice since the first PC was sold." AFAIR, at least the floppy disks told us the true - 360 KB was 360 * 1024, and not 360 * 1000. I suspect that also the ancient hard disks didn't lie, and just at some time during the gigabyte race the truth has been thrown away ...Comment by mike on July 22, 13:59
Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
Jolyon, I appreciate that it is common practice, but I really don't think that "everyone" knows this. While I learned it from my first 20mb HDD, my father was very angry that his new 250gb HDD did not have enough space to backup his 240gb of files. People go to the shop with their needs in mind and it doesn't help to have bad numbers against them.Comment by Drew on July 22, 21:51
Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
@ Drew For your outrage to rest on solid foundations, I trust that your father is equally furious that when he saves a text file with 20 characters in it, it actually occupies a much greater amount of actual disk - typically a number of KB - and the operating system is "lying" to him about the amount of storage required to save the actual physical bytes in that file. Not to mention, even the act of "formatting" a disk can affect the actual capacity, before you've stored any actual "data" on it. If he is not as furious, why not? He is just as surely being lied to and just as surely having the actual capacity of his HDD reduced from that which he might believe it to be capable of. Commoditisation of technology certainly brings with it a lot of problems - not so many years ago your father wouldn't even have had a requirement for an external HDD or to know or care about . Just as once upon a time he would not have needed to know or care about true fuel economy of internal combustion engines, or the affect of running air conditioning in a vehicle powered by such a thing. As I said before... this is the way it is. Get over it. It isn't going to change, so all we can do is educate ourselves (and others) to a level where we are competent to participate in the marketplace. Capitalism unfortunately makes demands of consumers - it's the nature of the beast.Comment by Jolyon Smith [http://www.deltics.co.nz] on July 24, 07:22
Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
Marco - you're hardly alone here; the GiB vs GB issue is an old complaint. The best way forward is to lodge a formal complaint with your local trading standards or advertising standards authority alleging that the drive's packaging was misleading about its true capacity. IME drive packaging does normally mention that 1GB=1E+9 bytes, so if yours didn't that only strengthens your complaint.Comment by M J Marshall [http://www.kingstairs.com] on July 24, 19:51
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Maxtor Lost GigaBytes
Comment by Jade [] on July 21, 17:20