Thread: why are USB flash drive "GB" so small?
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Old June 3rd 10, 04:18 AM posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage,comp.arch.storage
Rod Speed
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Default why are USB flash drive "GB" so small?
wrote
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,

Yep.

which are almost universally made in power-of-two sizes.

Wrong.