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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. |
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why are USB flash drive "GB" so small?
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#3
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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. |
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why are USB flash drive "GB" so small?
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