Maximum PC

The author incorrectly states the size of the hard drives. For example, he writes:

"We tested the 240GB version of the drive, which is 223GB after being formatted".

I can't imagine why formatting a drive would take up an additional 17 GB of space. If it did, you're doing it wrong.

What the author doesn't realize is that hard drive manufacturers like to advertise their drives in powers of 10, where in computing, powers of 2 are used.

Instead of using 2^10 (1024) for a kB, hard drive manufacturers use 10^3 (1000).

To get the proper value using 1024 bytes in a kB, we need to take the advertised value and divide by 1,073,741,824 (1024^3 for GB).

Which is 240,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 = 223.517 GB. This then gives us a value that closely matches what the computer will end up showing for the drive capacity, which in this case is 223 GB.

I'm pretty sure the author knows but didn't want to spend another paragraph going into that gritty. And you're supposed to call it the "240GB version" because that's what it's marketed as. Not the "really 223GB version".

If he's writing tech articles for a tech magazine, I'm pretty sure he knows that information about hard drives.

Just sayin...

The rest of the article sounds very knowledgeable. It's just that it sounds misleading to say that the capacity of the hard drive is significantly smaller as a result of formatting it.

I think everyone (well, most people) realize that manufacturer's like to use decimal (base 10) when describing their drives, but the computer bases the volume on binary (base 2). And Makoto did a good job of explaining the difference in the first post.

But I too found the article odd - in fact, I highlighted the comment so I could ask about it here (yes, I highlight my mag - what's wrong with that?!)



Over-provisioning is NOT the difference between decimal and binary. For those that don't know, over-provisioning is hidden storage the SSD uses to perform administrative tasks, like TRIM. The user should not see this space.

So I'm torn: I lean towards agreeing with Makoto that this is a decimal v. binary difference, but Josh states otherwise. Is it possible it is a true 240GB drive with a 16-ish GB hidden sector? Perhaps the author of the article could confirm. Josh...?