SSD Capacity Misrepresentation

Im looking to upgrade my laptop to SSD, I run some bulky programs so it will have to be a 240GB drive, i will probably go with the HyperX fury for the money.

During my research however I found that HDD manufacturers advertise capacity in base 10, but windows displays capacities in mixed base notation ie. a 1TB HDD is 10^12 Bytes, but displays in windows as 931GB since Microsoft considers 1024^3 to be a Gigabyte. It appears SSD's will be seen this way as well.

Does anyone know why microsoft defines a gigabyte this way? (aside from the obvious power of 2)

Well, it's a combination of using 10^3 or 2^10, and also formatting.

My 120GB and 256GB SSDs show up in Windows as 111GB and 238GB, respectively.

everyone does it. since dawn of pc time

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yes, they mostly do, seeing as most of the HDD manufacturers also produce SSDs this shouldn't come as a surprise...
it seems to be standard(for them at least) to say 1000kB = 1 MB ect instead of 2^10= 1024
so my 250gb samsung evo 840 is rather 231 gb

there is a table somewhere out there for all common sizes..

They dont, they mark them in decimal, since 1 Terabyte is decimal 1000^4 , and your computer reports in sizes of 1024, 1024^4 it shows up as less because its not 1TiB its 931GiB (or 1TB)

So, its actually your computer that's mis-labeling the information.

@Eden, yeh your right... usual Microsoft antics, why would they mix notation like that?

Yeah. In linux you can switch between them. Not sure what DEs default to. But you can use ls --si to get powers of 1000

It wasn't until the late 90s that those rules were put in place.
This is kind of a chicken and the egg scenario, as HDDs were labeled with GB before the language and IEEE standardized on the difference between Kb, KB and Kib, KiB.

So initially they were mis-labeling the drives, then later on, the language changed to make them correct.

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The other thing I want to point out, All system Memory is labeled GB, when it should be GiB.

What's the difference between all of those?

Kb <--- KiloBits
KB <--- KiloBytes
Kib <--- Kibibits
KiB <--- KibiBytes

What is a 'kibi' bit/byte

So 8GB of ram is actually 8GiB

Now if you apply that to GiB does that make it gibs? :)

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Kib is 1024 bits
Kb is 1000 bits

But isn't JEDEC why we do GB instead of GiB?

Perfect exactly what I wanted. ty!

Yeah, theres a lot of wrong labeling, especially on the OS'

Lots of standards.. no one uses them :/

Until just now I thought it was only GB and Gb

64GB == 59.6046 GiB

If your machine reported 59,604,600 KiBytes You would be one pissed off cookie.