1 TB of Space
I got a new hard drive from NewEgg two weeks ago. It’s a whopping 1TB of space, and it was a steal at $75 with free shipping. Of course the bummer is that the marketing makes it sound bigger than it is. When formatted, I lose about 70GB of space and am left with 931GB of space. Talk about shrinkage. I remember the days when a 256MB hard drive was 256 megabytes. They didn’t have any of this funky messing with bits and bytes, decimal and base 2. Oh well. Times have changed.
In any case, I’m very excited to start filling it. My current hard drive is 250GB (really 228GB). One of the partitions is 180 GB, and it is nearly full of pictures and other data. Between my 10.1 megapixel dSLR and 8 megapixel point-and shoot, I’ve got over 110GB of photos. I’ve also got about 30 GB of iTunes data including music and videos. I can’t imagine what I’d do if I had the 5D Mark II or the Sony Alpha A900
The one thing I was worried about was if the drive came DOA (dead on arrival). If you look at the user reviews on the right of that NewEgg page, there’s a fair number of people who have complained about that. So in order to mitigate that risk, I took out a couple of insurance policies. The first one is almost literally an insurance policy. I paid extra for the extended warranty.
The second one is that I took the time to stress test the drive. Frankly, I had no idea how to do it, or what utility to use, but that’s what Google is for. The first entry on the list was for something called Barts Stuff Test. Doesn’t sound that compelling from the title, but I figured I’d give it a look. And apparently Google found exactly what I was looking for:
Bst5 (Bart’s Stuff Test v5) is a small win32 application for long term heavy stress testing storage devices. Bst5 supports testing at file and device level.
That ought to do it! And it even supports hard drives of my size and larger:
Bst5 supports very large volumes, up to 16 exabyte (17.179.869.184 Gigabyte) enough to last for at least 30 years.
Perfect!
So I downloaded it, started it up, and let it run. And run. And run. It ran for almost 5 days straight. Nothing broke during that time, so I’m assuming that we’re good.
Thanks Barts! Time to start filling this sucker up. See ya!
It’s an understandable misunderstanding on the part of the customer. In the same way that communications are always related in terms of BITS per second (small b in Mb/s or Mbps) while hard drive transfer rates are quoted in terms of BYTES (8 bits) per second (big B in MB/s or MBps), such is the life of storage. Storage media is almost always quoted using decimal definitions of mega or giga (1,000,000 or 1,000,000,000 respectively) while storage area in operating systems is quoted using the binary definitions of mega or giga instead (1024 ^ 2 or 1024 ^ 3 respectively).
That’s why you’ve noticed a larger discrepancy as your hard drives’ storage capacities grow. It isn’t that marketing is getting bolder or your file system is getting hungrier, it’s simply that the divide between definitions for x gigabytes (decimal) and x gigabytes (binary) is growing larger due to the larger multiplier of that unit. 1,000,000,000,000 bytes is a “1TB Hard Drive” even though it’s only 1000000000000 / (1024 ^ 3) binary-definition gigabytes (931.3).
I get that. But what you’re missing is what I wrote in the first paragraph. “I remember the days when a 256MB hard drive was 256 megabytes. They didn’t have any of this funky messing with bits and bytes, decimal and base 2. Oh well. Times have changed.”
Back in the day, they didn’t play these decimal/binary games. A megabyte was a megabyte. And a 256MB hard drive had 256MB, not 240MB or whatever it would be when you do the decimal/binary conversion.