Fake storage space

[Master15]

Whenever i look at a memory stick it would tell me howmuch space it has whenever i look at it with my psp or computer it has less then speifided
ex: my 2gig says 1.86gb thats a whole 140mb that im missing thats a allot of game space gone

[KmR]

That's normal. The larger the memory, the more gets cut off. My brother has like 460 GB on a 500 GB external HDD. It's pretty gay. The should just advertise the user space.

[Master15]

Daaaaaaannnngggg id bee pissed if i lost all of that jeeesh somebody should sue for false avertising

[KmR]

It's on the package...

[cheema201]

I agree... i think it is stupid.. the 16gb memory stick doesn't even have 15gb.. so they are misleading. but most places that sell memory sticks and hard drives will normally tell u the actual space also, probly to avoid being sued

[hayd3r]

its dumb i know. probebly not 100% genuine. but if u get a real fake thats 4gb. then its not even 150mb. i highly recommend that u only buy these things from GAME, GAMESTATION AMAZON ITSELF AND NOT PEOPLE WHO JOIN AND SELL. do not get preowned ones. 85% of preowned ones are fake. i got my fake 4gb from DUBAI

[Master15]

youch there has goota bee a diffrent way to make all of the space avalible i mean what in the world do they do to storage devices to lose valuble space

[Intergalactic Captain]

This has nothing to do with being real or fake, rather it is a fact of the matter with formatting. EVERY drive is sold by the raw number...The end user, however, must format it before using it. Ever notice how every single flash and hard drive on the market contains that same disclaimer that defines the size of a gigabyte?

A rough breakdown for ya - The manufacturer, under the definition of the term, considers a kilobyte to be 1,000 bytes. However, a kilobyte as used by your computer is 1,024 bytes. As such, your computer always needs to "steal" a little space from the next block to format the current one - Correspondingly, your actual storage space will always be less than the stated space on the box.

...I know that was probably incredibly incoherent, but hopefully everyone gets the gist of it.

[Master15]

I get it don't think you the only smart one so does that mean if i format my memory card to a fat with the lowest allocation size on my vista comp does that put more memory in it

[KmR]

Just think of it like this, it will display about 70-73 MB less for each GB, so if your hard drive is supposed to be 2GB then windows / PSP / whatever will register it as 1.85GB.

2 GB theoretically: 2147483648 bytes = 2097152 KB = 2048 MB = 2 GB
2 GB Memory Stick: 2000000000 bytes = 1953125 KB = 1907.34863 MB = 1.86265 GB

Companies make 2 GB cards 2000000000 bytes instead of 2147483648 bytes. I don't understand why they don't just use the theoretical form of a GB rather than their version of a GB.

It's probably more complicated I assume.

[Intergalactic Captain]

No, as I said it's all about bytes. Drive manufacturers label their drives in base-10 while computers use base-8. The definition of a kilobyte/megabyte/gigabyte is a holdover from back when everything came in multiples of 8;

8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024 <- That's where the 1024 number came from for the definition of a kilobyte. The same numbering system applies to megs, gigs, terabytes, petabytes, you name it...Nothing you can do short of starting a new computer architecture based on a 10-bit system rather than 8-bit binary is gonna change it.

EDIT - What KMR said...posted at the same time.

[Master15]

Hehe so is there a 10 bit computer out there and if there is'nt then do you think a 10bit comp will come out,also what does formating in diffrent allocate size do.

[Mitochondria]

Well there is a program that allows you to physically gain that space back. May damage the card and render it useless.....And i forgot the name of it. Also my 2GB mem card has 1917MB user capacity and 7760 for my 8GB.

[slippy]

master15: Allocation size is the minimum amount of space that can be taken up by one file. For example, if you set an allocation size of 64k on a drive and copy a 1k file to the drive, you will use 64k of space on the drive. The smaller the allocation size, the less space wasted by small files. The downside is that, with a smaller allocation size, more individual read operations have to take place to read/write a larger file which can reduce the speed of reading and writing a file on the drive.

[Master15]

Well then at least it's still eficient in space so i can handle it being slow to write/read