Whats true size of a 320Gb hard drive

A_Clock

Im thinking about getting this drive. How much space would i really get from it?

Millionare

320*0.93 = 297.6gig

superscaper

320 GB = 320,000,000,000 Bytes which is about 298 Gibibytes which most people (including Microsoft) incorrrectly refer to as gigabytes.

Millionare

Hard drive manufacturers define a megabyte as 1,000,000 bytes and a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes. This is a decimal (base 10) measurement and is the Industry standard.

However, certain system BIOSs, FDISK and Windows define a megabyte as 1,048,576 bytes and a gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes. Mac systems also use these values. These are binary (base 2) measurements.

superscaper

As Millionaire says, the binary measurements used create a discrepancy and confusion because they incorrectly use the SI decimal prefixes (kilo, mega, giga etc) which should never be mixed with different bases. The hard disk manufacturers use the correct definitions of the prefixes but they're also in the wrong for using them at all instead of binary prefixes (kibi, mebi gibi etc).