Truth In Advertising

[Msterbeau]

So. If you buy a 500GB hard drive, you are not actually getting a 500GB drive. It's more like a 485GB drive. So why isn't it advertised as a 485GB drive?

What other electronic specs don't seem entirely truthful to you?

[Head Wreck]

pmpo rattings on speakers...

crud. theres another set blown in my car

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

Not understanding how something works on the part of the consumer is not the same thing as false advertising.

you are getting a 500gb hard drive when you buy one. How much of it is actually usable after it is formatted is dependant on your file system. Formatting "draws" a "map" on the hard drive and creates some form of table of addresses for that map. That takes space. The bigger the drive... the bigger the table and the more space used for the map.

You buy hard drives "raw" or unformatted... so a 500gb drive is actually 500gb.... until you format it.

There is also "rounding" done by the OS in some cases. As in, the hard drive see's 1mb of space as 1024bytes.. but the OS hates counting by 1024... it likes the number 1000... so it rounds those 1024 blocks of space to 1000 when it reports to you the user... but internally.. it uses the full 1024... until you get into slack space... but that even more indepth.

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

but to answer the actual question....

CPU's should never have their operating frequency posted in a way the user can seem them. More so than ever, it is a meaningless number when it comes to performance.

I can show you about 40 cpus from Intel and AMD that all run at 2400Mhz. Somehow, they all actually perform at different speeds.

An accurate performance index that applies to all CPUs not matter the manufacturer is what is needed.

[jadnifer]

I know how electronics work. But when it comes to the ins and outs of the technical stuff I am ignorant.

[Msterbeau]

Not understanding how something works on the part of the consumer is not the same thing as false advertising.

you are getting a 500gb hard drive when you buy one. How much of it is actually usable after it is formatted is dependant on your file system. Formatting "draws" a "map" on the hard drive and creates some form of table of addresses for that map. That takes space. The bigger the drive... the bigger the table and the more space used for the map.

You buy hard drives "raw" or unformatted... so a 500gb drive is actually 500gb.... until you format it.

There is also "rounding" done by the OS in some cases. As in, the hard drive see's 1mb of space as 1024bytes.. but the OS hates counting by 1024... it likes the number 1000... so it rounds those 1024 blocks of space to 1000 when it reports to you the user... but internally.. it uses the full 1024... until you get into slack space... but that even more indepth.

I get what your saying... but I disagree that a manufacturer should be able to quote the unformatted size when it's the formatted size that matters. That's not "not understanding" it semantics and marketing deception. The reality is that you can only store the formatted amount of data. That should be what's advertised. At the very least the word "Unformatted" should be next to the raw size. Then a range of probable formatted sizes.

Along those lines... Automobile engine horsepower. There are different ratings methods. There's a fairly new SAE one adapted a couple years ago but manufacturers are still free to use whatever one they want. You're never REALLY sure which unless they specify so. Japanese manufactures often underrate their engines in order to comply with government regs. Then there's flywheel output vs. output at the wheels. What's more honest? Driveline power losses vary. A more consistent rating would be at the wheel.

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

California lost that court case already. Like 10 years ago. (they also lost the case that tried to make the industry stop using the words master and slave)

It's a 500gb drive. Some file systems can use the whole 500GB (Netware for one), some(most) don't. The factory has no idea what OS you are going to run.

Lets take a storage shed as an example...

You buy one that has 1000sf of space. Then you put shelves, a cabinet and workbenches in it. now you have 1700sf of space left that you can actually use... except you need a pathway to walk around in... so now you can inly use about 1500sf....

Is that the manufactures fault?

[Daevion]

There's enough "truth" in advertising to fill an atom. As all those Geico commericial that say switching to gieco will "save" u money.......every search comparison I did showed Geico as one of the MORE expensive insurances....so yeah I totally believe what commercials say.

[Msterbeau]

California lost that court case already. Like 10 years ago. (they also lost the case that tried to make the industry stop using the words master and slave)

It's a 500gb drive. Some file systems can use the whole 500GB (Netware for one), some(most) don't. The factory has no idea what OS you are going to run.

Lets take a storage shed as an example...

You buy one that has 1000sf of space. Then you put shelves, a cabinet and workbenches in it. now you have 1700sf of space left that you can actually use... except you need a pathway to walk around in... so now you can inly use about 1500sf....

Is that the manufactures fault?

I guess my issue with the hard drives is with bold print vs. fine print then. Considering that the usable amount is most likely to be less... it should be stated that you're mostly likely not going to get the full capacity. Capacity is the single most important issue on a hard drive. Speed, cache, etc are all secondary. It should be the spec that is reflected most accurately. If you tell me in bold letters that I'm not going to get full capacity because of formatiing, I can accept that. If you just say it's a 500GB drive and I don't get that in reality, I'm likely (Have been) a little annoyed. Putting it in small text on the side of the box or inside some manual less then honest in my point of view. Whatever. I guess if the court decided then I must be wrong.

The problem I have with your shed analogy is that people generally expect to decide what shelves to put in and where. Equating it to a hard drive is like the shed came with shelves that you MUST put in. Who expects that? Oh yeah... I should be "responsible" and read every last piece of text on/in the package. Small print is often used to list stuff that you hope the consumer will miss - and THAT is fundamentally dishonest.

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

Capacity is the single most important issue on a hard drive. Speed, cache, etc are all secondary.

You lost me as soon as you said that. For a few reasons... first off... Cache reflects directly on the speed of the drive. Being a hardware geek, I read the hardware magizines and hardware websites... I read all the reviews of every generation drive that comes outand all the technical docs on the new standards (SATA3 is looking mighty sweet). There is a reason the fastest drives are not all that large. There is a reason that with every bump in areal density theyhave a corrisponding bump in cache size and drive speed. I don;t think you realize how important fast is with a large drive...

If your 500GB SATA2, that most likely has 16mb of cache and a 7200spindal speed... and around a 5-10ms access time.... If you limited that to to SATA1, a 4500rpm spindal speed, upted the access time to around 20ms and tuned all the cache except 2mb off.... that would put you at the hard drive speed of about 6 years ago.

You OSx or WinXP boot time would go to about 15min. Opening programs would be a go get a cup of coffee situation and maybe stop and look out the window for a while. You CPU would be sitting idle because it would be waiting for the hard drive to send it data.

BTW maximum PC just did a review of the new generation HDs last issue. They compared all the new 1000gb drives. Even though the Western Digital had the coolest new features and was actually "green" in it's power cunsomption... It finished with the lowest score. It's slow as a snail.

btw, the court is who decided that disclaimer needed to be there. As every day consumers started getting more involved with thier purchaes.. people started getting confused by the same thing you are getting frustrated over.

No one is forcing you to use an OS that cant access a raw hard drive.

You don't have to agree with the courts on this. As it made it all the way to the 9th appelit court.. I highly doubt you have any chance of changing the whole computer industry to fit how you think things should work rather learning how thing actually work.

wanna get confused some more? A 10Mb/second network connection will never transfer 10MB of data in a second no matter how much it seems like it should.

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

BTW, you are getting you whole 500MB of capacity... The formatting is your data.

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

and we never even touched on "slack"

Say you use the default formatting options for OSx... you get a cluster size of 4k.... which means.. thats the minimum hard drive space used by a file. You put a 1k file on your drive.. it uses 4k of space. you make an empty folder.. it uses 4k. you install a 400mb in size programs.. how many files were of a size evenly divided by 4?

My point is... you will never get 500gb of data on a 500gb drive.

It's how hard drives work. Even if they changed the labeling to be more precise.. how big would that label be? They have no idea what size cluster you going to set.

I deal mostly in large files.. my cluster size is 64k on my storage drive. Empty folders will fill my drive fast. Is that the manufacturees fault?

[Msterbeau]

and we never even touched on "slack"

Say you use the default formatting options for OSx... you get a cluster size of 4k.... which means.. thats the minimum hard drive space used by a file. You put a 1k file on your drive.. it uses 4k of space. you make an empty folder.. it uses 4k. you install a 400mb in size programs.. how many files were of a size evenly divided by 4?

My point is... you will never get 500gb of data on a 500gb drive.

It's how hard drives work. Even if they changed the labeling to be more precise.. how big would that label be? They have no idea what size cluster you going to set.

I deal mostly in large files.. my cluster size is 64k on my storage drive. Empty folders will fill my drive fast. Is that the manufacturees fault?

I learned about slack and partitioning long ago.

it's not that I don't know about all these things. It's that I'm annoyed about the disparity between the raw size and the usable size. You can spout all the geeky shit you want but if a drive is advertised at 500GB, I want 500 USABLE GB. I just ordered two 750's. We'll see what I really get...

And... if I ask 100 people the most important thing about a hard drive... I'd bet you that capacity is the winner by a landslide. The other stuff may matter.... But it's not the top of mind thing. Speed would be next. Then cache and connections.. At that point your heavily into geek territory. That was my point.

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

You don't think it's important because you don't think about it. No one hs taken it away yet. As drives get bigger, they have to be faster to be the same speed.

Take those same 100 people... let them use a 500GB drive without all the new fancy speed enhancments turned on. Then tell them, you can have the speed back and loose 100GB or keep the 100GB and stay slow. I'd bet my left nut the vast majority would take the speed because the computer would be damnnear unusable.

and you are using the full 500GB. Your Master File Table (if your using an NTFS partition) is taking up about 32gb of it. I don;t remember off hand how much is used by a mac partion or what they call their index. Point is, you can have the cake or you can eat it.

[predaking]

You don't think it's important because you don't think about it. No one hs taken it away yet. As drives get bigger, they have to be faster to be the same speed.

Take those same 100 people... let them use a 500GB drive without all the new fancy speed enhancments turned on. Then tell them, you can have the speed back and loose 100GB or keep the 100GB and stay slow. I'd bet my left nut the vast majority would take the speed because the computer would be damnnear unusable.

and you are using the full 500GB. Your Master File Table (if your using an NTFS partition) is taking up about 32gb of it. I don;t remember off hand how much is used by a mac partion or what they call their index. Point is, you can have the cake or you can eat it.

what HICAP drive would you suggest? see, i'm building a new computer and that is the only thing i'm hung up on

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

Depends how much storage you want.

In the 500GB drive catagory:

Western Digital WD5000KS

In the 1000GB catagory it's a toss up:

Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11

I actually suggest two hard drives... one for the OS and one for data. for the OS drive I suggest a Western Digital Raptor X (Three in Raid 0 prolly the fastest your ever going to get)

[Msterbeau]

I actually suggest two hard drives... one for the OS and one for data. for the OS drive

That's the way I set mine up. It's both safer and faster.

At work I have only system and apps on the MacBook pro. Data lives on an external Lacie 500GB and a second Lacie is used for backup.

At home I currently have the system on a 200GB Hitachi with some data there and some on an external Lacie 125GB. I'm about to change that to the OS and apps only on the Hitachi and data and backup on separate external 750GB drives. I would havew gone with internals but I plan to migrate to a MacBook Pro one of these days and that will require the externals. Might as well save myself the trouble of dealing with copying data later on.

BTW. Another important criteria for me is reliability. I got a Seagate a couple years ago... it's been a piece of shit. The Hitachi has been flawless as far as I can tell. I like Lacies too. They're a bit more expensive for size/speed but they have very good reputations. Researching Western Digital... I didn't get a great feeling about them.