Have you ever bought a PC, Mac or maybe an external hard drive? Have you bought the product thinking your hard drive is going to be 320 GB or 8 GB USB stick and it turns out when you look at it, that it’s lower then what you thought bought?

Yeah I’ve done that and I hate it. I had no idea why at first and I was unbelievably frustrated with it. I bought 500 GB I want 500 GB! I dug into the reasoning behind this quite a while ago and I thought I would share it with you today:

Notes
1) For simplicity and consistency, 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.
From Techzonez

Basically, depending on how you measure bytes determines how much space you actually have. I think this is absolutely absurd. When I buy something I want to know what it is. I don’t go into a department store and tell someone to just chuck me a pair of pants, for all I know I could be getting a pair of Pixar’s Cars Pajama pants, or ladies joggers with those holsters on the ankles or some old man pair of chords. If I buy a hard drive that has 931 GB, then I want to know it has 931 GB (I recently opened a TB external hard drive and already knew it wouldn’t be a full TB, instead I got 69 GB less).

Check out what Wikipedia has to say

I’m sure you have learned this already, but in case you haven’t, research what you’re buying. Don’t just buy something because it looks cool, it might actually suck big time (aka most of HP products) and don’t just buy something because it costs a lot (more expensive does not always equal better quality). Find out what you’re buying and make an informed decision. People at the store are not always informed… stay tuned to my blog as I’ll be posting a conversation I had with a Future Shop employee last week.

Cheers and happy shopping!

Matthew A. Hawkins