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Should HDD Companies Get Closer To their Advertised Capacities?
Poll ended at June 11th, 2015, 5:19
Yes On All HDDs 25%  25%  [ 2 ]
Yes, But Only if they are large capacity 13%  13%  [ 1 ]
No, Leave the advertising as it has always been 25%  25%  [ 2 ]
No, Its not a big deal 38%  38%  [ 3 ]
Total votes : 8
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 Post subject: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 12th, 2015, 5:19 
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Hello members, and thanks for allowing me to write my first question/statement within this forum. I am very new here, I have created, used, discussed in many forums over my 30+ years of internet activities, however, I stumbled across this forum because I wanted to discuss an issue I find relevant to HDDs past and present.

The Subject I wanted to label is a bit long so I decided to just label as 'Deceptive or Not' ..

Ok, I would like to know why HDD manufacturers simply wont design the technology of HDDs to oversize the actual branded capacity so consumers can actually get what they feel they are buying?

Example: All of my computer years I have not once bought a HDD that will physically yield what the manufacture is pitching in terms of capacity.. I understand that some of the capacity will normally be sacrificed for the drives functioning purposes etc.. Well why not create a 3.2 TB drive so the user will actually get 3TB? This baffles me, and I have to say, to me, it falls alone legality of false advertisement, however, I am aware that the drive may be 3TB with the exception of usable capacity, so false advertising false short.

So I ask, why not create above labeled capacity so consumers will get what they get when advertised?

This is concerning to me because I just purchased an 8TB HDD, and I am only getting a usable 7.2TB, I am losing over 700Gb of storage.. This is not what I paid for.

Anyhow, Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think about the Manufacturers design process over all these years. It shouldn't hurt to add a little to the capacity to get a real usable advertised capacity.. Thanks 8)


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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 12th, 2015, 7:22 
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FWIW I don't think it matters - the average user doesn't know enough about byte sizes to even worry about losing a gig or so.

this phenomenon exists everywhere - fuel mileage, top speed, eco rating in the Auto industry. Light bulb longevity, even simple things such as 9hr tealights.. they are advertised as "up to 9hrs" but peope always refer to them as the ones that last 9 hours.

Also, anyone that DOES understand this probably understands the deal on the label. I don't vote on stuff, I think it is often quite pointless, but rather explain in an answer.


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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 12th, 2015, 11:34 
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In terms of raw disk capacity it is a true 3TB. It is less as result of the file system format, which varies slightly from file system to another.

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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 12th, 2015, 11:51 
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Understood, however, as capacities get larger, as in my 8TB case, I believe it will become more of a concern for more consumers, and I would say rightfully so. In my case 750gb of un-shown capacity is what got me to this forum.. :)

Thanks for the reply.


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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 12th, 2015, 13:58 
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@hotwire, are you aware that capacities are advertised in "decimal" terabytes rather than "binary" terabytes?

http://www.google.com/search?q=8TB+in+TiB

8 terabytes = 7.27595761 tebibytes

http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HD ... y_FAQ.html

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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 12th, 2015, 19:21 
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That's great knowledge .. Thanks.. As most consumers I am normally going by the information displayed on my pc.. Therefore, when a drive capacity reads you only have for example, 300mb available on a 1TB HDD, that's the only concern, basically the capacity readout from the PC. decimal and binary won't have much relevance to the average user on a pc, IMHO.

I did not know that, so thanks for the info. :)


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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 12th, 2015, 21:07 
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Franc, I think that is Hotwires point. Drive manufacturers displaying numbers that on the surface look like one thing, but then when customer has come home, purchase done, the fine print is saying, oh? disappointed.. no, we told you, it is right there on the box.

Would be like a lottery in England.. win a MILLION, do you want a 1,000,000??? then the winner finds out in fine print it is American Dollars.

As it is the filesystem that determines the exact number of useable storage bytes, it is difficult to say on the box. In this case I think it just is what it is, and people that need to know will find out what the numbers are and either think it is dodgy, or no... and the other 95% of population will just go on being their oblivious to anyting not liked 100 times on facebook. Yes, I have given up on this species!


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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 12th, 2015, 21:34 
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In fact it can be argued that HDD manufacturers are truthfully and unambiguously reporting the capacities of their products. After all, they are using "GB" and "TB" in their strictly correct forms. It is in fact Microsoft et al who are ambiguously and improperly using the terms GB and TB when they really mean "GiB" and "TiB". To me it's like trying to understand how much is in a gallon when you don't know whether the context is US or imperial (litres make much more sense anyway).

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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 13th, 2015, 18:27 
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How many bits is a Gigabyte? That's what the mfgs should advertise. No more no less.

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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 13th, 2015, 18:55 
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For once I'm actually with Frank on this one. The problem isn't the drive manufacturers, it's the OS which is using the wrong terminology. Perhaps in Windows 10 they will have it report the drive capacity in true Gigabytes.

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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 13th, 2015, 20:18 
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It wouldn't be difficult for HDD manufacturers to switch from TB to TiB, but imagine what would happen if people were to insist that flash drive manufacturers should provide 1GiB of actual capacity rather than 1GB?

BTW, ISTR that at least some HDD manufacturers clarify the units of measurement on the label, or specify the total number of LBAs (which may or may not be meaningful to a buyer who is arithmetically challenged).

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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 13th, 2015, 21:29 
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also, if you buy a flash drive with exactly 1GB or GiB or whatever, storage may decrease over time depending how the bad block management is done, so after a year the numbers on the label are meaningless.


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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 14th, 2015, 2:39 
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HaQue wrote:
also, if you buy a flash drive with exactly 1GB or GiB or whatever, storage may decrease over time depending how the bad block management is done, so after a year the numbers on the label are meaningless.

I'm not sure we're on the same wavelength.

If a flash drive maker were to produce a 32GiB drive, for example, then he could not make use of current off-the-shelf NAND chips with binary based capacities. That's because there would be no space for wear levelling, bad blocks, and other firmware overheads.

For example, a flash drive with a quoted capacity of 32GB that is built around a single 32GiB chip automatically reserves about 7% of its capacity for internal use.

1 GB / 1 GiB = 0.931

AISI, a 32GiB flash drive built with a single 32GiB NAND could not work. Instead the chip would need to be redesigned with a capacity of 34GiB or thereabouts. That would then open up a can of worms.

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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 17th, 2015, 21:26 
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:) The technology on storage here is much appreciated, I still can't wrap around it being an overblown request for the manufacturers to either add a bit more capacity and label it lower so the consumers can feel better about what they just purchased and/or it wouldn't cost that much more production to label a variable capacity such as: 5 - 6 TB HDD Capacity, at least the consumer would know the usable storage would be anywhere from 5 to 6 TBs..

Let's face it, Windows has continued to be the dominating consumer PC for some years now and it is a shame their tech with HDDs are not on point.

As a final concern, I will repeat that I was a bit upset to plug my 8TB HDD up and have over 750GB not available.. That is quite a bit of storage I can use for data. I was ready to accept anywhere from 2 to 300GB of unusable storage but not 750GBs.

I would say over the years it hasn't been a big concern for most users, however, do we just turn our heads as HDDs or SSDs get larger and more and more capacities are not accounted for? Windows or not, I would say the labeling of variable capacity or higher capacity to show closer to more advertised capacity is not a terrible request to seek from manufacturers.


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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 18th, 2015, 4:36 
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Quote:
As a final concern, I will repeat that I was a bit upset to plug my 8TB HDD up and have over 750GB not available.. That is quite a bit of storage I can use for data. I was ready to accept anywhere from 2 to 300GB of unusable storage but not 750GBs.


For me, I guess because I have essentially come to accept what the situation is, it seems like you build a library and then complain the Catalog systems take up too much space that could be used for books, or annoyed that the car engine is so heavy it wastes too much fuel.

not sure I see the point of the whole discussion. I understand wht you are saying, but pick your battles!


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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 18th, 2015, 19:01 
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[/quote]For me, I guess because I have essentially come to accept what the situation is, it seems like you build a library and then complain the Catalog systems take up too much space that could be used for books, or annoyed that the car engine is so heavy it wastes too much fuel.

not sure I see the point of the whole discussion. I understand wht you are saying, but pick your battles![/quote]

HaQue, It's very easy for topics to get off discussion, I've seen it for many years in forums..

It's not much to understand if you read my initial post regarding this topic.. It's either Yes or No you agree that HDD Manufactures should advertise closer to the capacity specs they label.

I've seen many times forum users will flip topics with negative replies instead of just staying with the general topic. I believe the topic I created has much relevance to consumers and advertising in regards to HDDs or SDDs capacities.

"Pick Your Battles!" what a useless reply.. Not even worth me attempting to comprehend.


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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 19th, 2015, 13:41 
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Quote:
It's not much to understand if you read my initial post regarding this topic.. It's either Yes or No you agree that HDD Manufactures should advertise closer to the capacity specs they label.


The fact that we're all trying to tell you is that HDD manufacturers do advertise the correct capacity specs. In fact most drives actually have a few more LBA than their advertised size. Problem is that the average user (you) just doesn't understand the difference be GB and GiB, and many OS use GiB to measure the drive capacity and then mislabel it as GB.

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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 19th, 2015, 13:52 
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Here's how the average user thinks about data capacities using base 10 (because that's how many fingers you have):

1TB = 1,000Gb = 1,000,000MB = 1,000,000,000KB = 1,000,000,000,000Bytes

It's also the numbers that HDD manufacturers use and is technically correct.

The reality is computers are not based on base 10 (since they don't have 10 fingers, just a trillion on off switches), they are binary and those numbers aren't efficient to use in binary code. So the system Windows and other computer OS use is that:

1TB = 1024GB = 1,048,576MB = 1,073,741,824KB = 1,099,511,627,776Bytes (though they should technically be TiB, MiB, KiB)

It's nothing a simple math equation couldn't fix to display properly the actual size, but M$ and other companies apparently don't think it's that important and most users have just come to expect a capacity to show lower that it is. Problem isn't the HDD capacity, just how Windows measures its size.

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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 19th, 2015, 18:14 
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I agree that it would be easy for HDD manufacturers to print dual capacity formats on the drive label, packaging, and datasheets, eg "8TB / 7.27TiB". I'm not sure that a failure to do so could be construed as deceptive, although it is obviously confusing.

Just FYI, there is an official standard (IDEMA LBA1-03) that "defines the required native LBA counts for a given capacity across all Disk manufacturers".

http://www.idema.org/wp-content/plugins ... hp?id=1223

Quote:
6.0 LBA counts and Advertised Capacity

Basic LBA count = Advertised Capacity / Sector Size
Basic Capacity = LBA count * Sector Size
IDEMA formula for LBA count and capacity provide 0.02% margin (see Table 1)

For SATA and SAS Disk Drive with 512bytes logical block size:

LBA counts = (97,696,368) + (1,953,504 * (Advertised Capacity in GBytes - 50))
Or
Advertised Capacity (GB) = [(LBA counts - 97,696,368)/1,953,504] + 50

Numbers 97,696,368, 1,953,504 and 50 are constants.

The lower 3 bits of the LBA count are zero (divisable by 8 with a remainder of 0). This is in order
to provide a even number of aligned sectors for emulation.

Examples:

To advertise a 500GB capacity, the required LBA count is:
LBA count = 97696368 + (1953504 * (500 - 50)) = 976,773,168

If a drive has a 585,397,500 LBA count then the advertised capacity is:
Advertised Capacity = [(585,397,500 - 97,696,368)/1,953,504] + 50 = 300GB

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 Post subject: Re: Deceptive or Not?
PostPosted: April 19th, 2015, 19:05 
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It's a little off-topic, but the 1.44MB floppy diskette is one case where the advertised capacity is incorrect, irrespective of whether the units are binary or decimal. The figure is actually a decimal-binary hybrid.

The diskettes were advertised as 1.44MB formatted or 2.0MB unformatted. In fact the actual capacity, in a standard PC, was 1440kiB. That's either 1.47MB or 1.406MiB.

80 tracks x 2 sides x 18 sectors/track x 512 bytes/sector = 1440 kiB

1440 kiB = 1.44 x 1000 x 1024 bytes

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