Drives

CD-ROM, DVD, floppy, hard disk drives, SCSI, ATA, IDE and other related questions.

Q: My hard disk was sold to me as a (for example) 30GB drive, but the capacity in properties says 28.6GB?

A: The operating system reports the capacity of the hard drive using the assumption that 1MB is equal to 1,048,576 bytes.  This is technically correct. (1,048,576 bytes or 1024 kilobytes is an uneven metric number, but makes an even binary number 10000000000.) The hardware manufacturers compute the size a bit differently. They consider 1MB to be equal to 1,000,000 bytes.