Calculate Your Actual Storage Space

[gamerfreak]

Well...I was looking at some hard drives and manually calculating their actual amount of storage, so I took about 10 minutes to write a calculator in PHP to do it for me.

At this point, I was really bored and made a layout for it.

You can test it out here:
RealDriveSize.com - Calculate your actual storage

Let me know if it seems inaccurate or returns any errors.

[cured]

thats neat, and accurate. i always wondered why i was missing 5GB

[WhiteEagle]

Looks great gamerfreak, and I've added it to my del.icio.us bookmarks!

[Death_blooms]

Thats kinda cool but i dont see how 1024 is a loss :shrugs:

[gamerfreak]

Originally Posted by Death_blooms

Thats kinda cool but i dont see how 1024 is a loss :shrugs:

My explanation sorta sucks. Here is what seagate says:

Originally Posted by Seagate KB

Hard drive manufacturers market drives in terms of decimal (base 10) capacity. In decimal notation, one megabyte (MB) is equal to 1,000,000 bytes, and one Gigabyte (GB) is equal to 1,000,000,000 bytes.

Programs such as FDISK, system BIOS, and Windows use the binary (base 2) numbering system. In the binary numbering system, one megabyte is equal to 1,048,576 bytes, and one gigabyte is equal to 1,073,741,824 bytes.

Simply put, decimal and binary translates to the same amount of storage capacity. Let's say you wanted to measure the distance from point A to point B. The distance from A to B is one kilometer or .621 miles. It is the same distance, but it is reported differently due to the measurement.

That last paragraph is a little deceptive. Say I have a folder of pictures that is exactly 1gb in size. I cannot fit them all on a 1gig flash drive as its actually a bit smaller because a kilo in binary is 1024, not 1000.

[Yellowhello]

Nice link, Gamer, seems I'm missing 5GB off my laptop... :(

[screwballl]

wow I posted the same binary versus decimal earlier and my post is gone.... oh well...

[Death_blooms]

Originally Posted by gamerfreak

My explanation sorta sucks. Here is what seagate says:



That last paragraph is a little deceptive. Say I have a folder of pictures that is exactly 1gb in size. I cannot fit them all on a 1gig flash drive as its actually a bit smaller because a kilo in binary is 1024, not 1000.

still dont get it 1024 is a bigger number shouldnt there be more storage space?

[gamerfreak]

Originally Posted by Death_blooms

still dont get it 1024 is a bigger number shouldnt there be more storage space?

No. Drive manufactures advertise 1gb at 1000mb, but the computer reads 1gb as 1024mb. Thus, you loose 24mb to the gig. Its actually a bit more when you get down to the nit of it.

[Death_blooms]

Ahh now i getcha so 1gb is realy 1024 not 1000 which makes them all liars