Wednesday, July 06, 2005

949 megabytes in my pocket

Well, got the delivery confirmation shortly before lunch so I ran out after having a quick meal and picked up that memory stick. Got back, popped the stick marked 1.0Gb into my PSP eager to check the actual capacity (I had heard various oddball numbers over time).

The total on mine: 949Mb... which isn't so bad I guess.
Industry standard is to round Gigabytes into billions of bytes - yes, even hard-drive manufacturers are guilty of this misleading practice. But measures of bytes are supposed to be base 2 and not base 10... that is where the confusion is.

Take 1 billion and divide by 1024 - that gives you the same value in kilobytes. Then again by 1024 to figure out the number of megabytes. According to the storage industry, 1 "gigabyte" is actually only 953 megabytes.

3 or 4 megabytes is acceptable for the overhead of defining a file structure, I guess. But still, the final tally is that I'm being shortaged about 50Mb on the Gb.

Wanna know something even funnier? The package for my new memory stick pro duo was marked "1.0GB" - as if indicating .0 would make it any more accurate. I'd said that it only indicates they are accurately screwing us over...

1 comment:

Becks said...

NICE!
I *heart* memory.

This is also a very good tid-byte (sic) to know!