Giga-bullshyte

Weak.

I get this Lacie external firewire drive labelled as 160 GB, bring it home, and lo and behold it comes up as having only 149.01 GB available. What's the deal? Where'd the other 11GB go?

Well, after checking the Lacie site to see what the problem might be, I find some lame explaination about how manufacturers apparently use a different definition of GIGABYTE than computers do. makes a lot of sense, eh?

So in math world, giga- means 10^9, so a gigameter is 1,000,000,000 meters (like kilemeter means 1,000 meters). For computers everything is base-2, of course, and so the closest power of 2 to 1000 is 1024, or 2^30. Ordinarily, people don't ever need to do this conversion, as when one looks at the size of a file, drive, or folder the result is usually presented in the computer-defined format (i.e. you have 59.4 GB available). So while I thought I was buying 160 GB, or 171,798,691,840 bytes, I was really buying 149.01 GB, or 160,000,000,000 bytes.

Why then would the number on the box be calculated with a different number than what is actually important to the computer? Easy answer...people think they're getting more, and manufacturers are getting away with it. Sounds like false advertising to me...

Byte me.