Cheap Trick.

When I want to buy something on the internet I get my son to use his credit card, I never had a credit card and I never will, I heard enough bad stories about people getting into serious debt, he's always happy to oblige me.
He told me there was a good deal going on memory sticks and I asked him to get me two. Here's my gripe, it says on the stick 16GB but when I put it in only 14.46GB are available, my son explained that some space has to be taken up by the stick in order to operate, a sort of working engine built in, OK I accept that no problem, but why do they have to play a cheap trick like that?, why don't they make the whole stick 17.46?, than you get your 16GB which you thought you were getting in the first place.

Re: Cheap Trick.

It is not a cheap trick. it has been the way ALL storage devices have been rated since computers started.

The storage device is measured as 1 gigabyte is 1000000000 bytes (which is the mathematical definition at a base of 10 to the power of 9) BUT your computer works on 1 gigabyte being 107374182 bytes ie 2 to the power of 30 (it is a binary device and counts in twos - on or off).

This means a 400 gigabyte hard disk will be reported as about 372GB by your computer it has always been so since Bill Gates was a lad.

Re: Cheap Trick.

Thanks for the explanation Bruce, but I still think it's misleading to say 16GB, after all the customer is only interested in the space he can use, say to fit in 16 films. Although it's only a small outlay for a 16GB stick one would lose a fair bit of space on a 3TB hard drive, it just annoys me when they dont spell it out on the label, to my way of thinking it's like buying a house and nobody tells you that you can't use the garden shed...ever.

Re: Cheap Trick.

Jimmy, when you go to the supermarket to do the weekly shopping do you question the weight of a product? Unless it states net weight, the weight of a product includes the packing as well.