Formatted Capacity Guide

[stevej696]

Hey Guys,

Just thought I would share a bit of info with the rest of you to solve a little problem I stumbled accross a while back about ACTUAL formated capadcity and how to work out what that would be. I did some research and put together the following guide that seems works pretty well.

If you want to know how much space you'll be able to use, just multiply the HDD specified space by a value of 0.93. The formatting method FAT/FAT32/NTFS/HFS etc, doesn't really matter. Just multiply by 0.93.

Technical terms, GB (gigabyte) stands for base-10 and GiB (gigibyte) stands for the base-2. When you click on My Computer and view your space, while it says GB, it's actually GiB. No one really uses GiB though, and so GB ends up standing for both, and that's where the capacity confusion is.

1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes (how HDDs are manufactured)

1GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes (how software actually sees and uses HDD space)

So heres a few common capacitys that people use worked out to their ACTUAL capacity using the formula:

40GB = 37GiB

80GB = 74GiB

100GB = 93GiB

120GB = 111GiB

160GB = 148GiB

200GB = 186GiB

250GB = 232GiB

300GB = 279GiB

320GB = 297GiB

400GB = 372GiB

500GB = 465GiB

750GB = 697GiB

1000GB = 930GiB

Hope this is helpful for people to work out what they need for OS drives etc and get a bit of education in the process. Took me a while

 

[nothingspecial]

Very helpful

FWIW, 60GB = 55.8GB - Thought that might be helpful to add, as it seems a common SSD size.

 

[sg12004]

Very helpful

+1

 

[stevej696]

Very helpful

FWIW, 60GB = 55.8GB - Thought that might be helpful to add, as it seems a common SSD size.

Thanks ye forgot that one

 

[gabriela_stanica]

I have two sticks of 4 GB USB but have different values ​​reported after formatting, why?

 

[dugdiamond]

I have two sticks of 4 GB USB but have different values ​​reported after formatting, why?

the sizes given are also for 'perfect' partitioning: there are physical and logical sizes...

the total (perfect) size of a storage medium is its' physical size

while partitioning/formatting, the OS notes bad sectors and indexes these in the FAT (like an index in a book)

these bad sectors will never be written to, and hence decreases the logical size (the amount of space available)... this space is the logical size

....

if one of your USB sticks has been used as a BOOTSTICK, the part that included the BOOT_OS will be locked out (RASH'd) - unless you FDISK the stick (to remove all partitions), this space will always be hidden to you AND any system that it is plugged into.

did that help?

 

[aNINJAsquid]

very helpful, thanks

+1