why are USB flash drive "GB" so small?
 

On May 27, 8:43*am, George Orwell wrote:
I got a USB flash drive of 8 GB, and it has just a pinch
over 8 x 10^9 bytes. I know magnetic disk GB are so,
but since the flash is solid state, I would expect that
it goes in powers of 2: 1024^3.
So where is the missing 7% of storage?


Mostly dedicated to things like manufacturing redundancy, spare
sectors and wear leveling. Almost all external storage* has always
been rated in the "proper" decimal amounts, the flash drive folks took
advantage of that.

*CDs (but not DVDs or other optical media) and some floppy formats
(the infamous “1.44MB floppy,” for example) are exceptions.

why are USB flash drive "GB" so small?
 

why are USB flash drive "GB" so small?
 

On Jun 1, 8:58*pm, "Rod Speed" wrote:
wrote:
George Orwell wrote
I got a USB flash drive of 8 GB, and it has just a pinch
over 8 x 10^9 bytes. I know magnetic disk GB are so,
but since the flash is solid state, I would expect that
it goes in powers of 2: 1024^3.
So where is the missing 7% of storage?
Mostly dedicated to things like manufacturing redundancy, spare sectors and wear leveling.

Nope, its just the difference between binary and decimal GBs.

Almost all external storage* has always been rated in the "proper"
decimal amounts, the flash drive folks took advantage of that.

There is no point in binary with a hard drive or flash drives.


Flash drives are made up of flash chips, which are almost universally
made in power-of-two sizes.

why are USB flash drive "GB" so small?
 

why are USB flash drive "GB" so small?
 

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage wrote:
On Jun 1, 8:58?pm, "Rod Speed" wrote:
wrote:
George Orwell wrote
I got a USB flash drive of 8 GB, and it has just a pinch
over 8 x 10^9 bytes. I know magnetic disk GB are so,
but since the flash is solid state, I would expect that
it goes in powers of 2: 1024^3.
So where is the missing 7% of storage?
Mostly dedicated to things like manufacturing redundancy, spare sectors and wear leveling.

Nope, its just the difference between binary and decimal GBs.

Almost all external storage* has always been rated in the "proper"
decimal amounts, the flash drive folks took advantage of that.

There is no point in binary with a hard drive or flash drives.


Flash drives are made up of flash chips, which are almost universally
made in power-of-two sizes.

Yes, but there is a portion that gets used for spare sectors and
wear-leveling management.

Arno

--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:
GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
----
Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans