Gadgetory

and what's the deal with hard drives I mean you don't drive anywhere in them the hardest thing about them is you buy a thousand gigabyte drive put it in your computer and you got nine hundred and thirty one gigabytes I mean what were they shaving in there now I'm sure you guys have seen this before and the discrepancy is caused by the fact that there are actually two different ways of representing amounts of data decimal or base ten is the more conventional way of representing these numbers but with the advent of modern computing binary or base two has sprung up now back when data sizes were much smaller an approximate equivalence II was drawn between a decimal kilobyte that is a thousand bytes and a binary Kibby byte which is 1,024 bytes sure why not it's all good well in their defense the difference was only a couple percent so it didn't matter this led to many cases of the incorrect use of prefixes but if this has been going on for years why are we suddenly noticing it now well customers never really cared when they're 16 megabyte fum drives showed up as 15 megabytes unchanged you chalked it up to inefficiencies in the formatting or rounding errors but check out this chart right here this shows how much smaller your drive will be if the manufacturer is calculating in decimal and the software is calculating in binary the difference becomes greater and greater as capacities continue to increase to make matters worse your hard drive is manufactured and reported in decimal capacities but many operating systems report the capacity in decimal but are actually calculating it in binary and what that means is that that one terabyte drive that Jerry Linus was talking about at the beginning actually is exactly what it says it is it's a thousand gigabytes but it's being reported as 931 gigabytes and I think we can all agree that a thousand gigabytes does not equal 931 gigabytes so there have been product return thanks for that there have even been lawsuits about this but the reality of it is there's not much you can do about it and once you look into it you'll find there are many discrepancies somewhere you're getting less than you thought some like computer memory where you're actually getting more than you thought you were this contrasts sharply with audible.com where you get exactly what you thought you were going to get in fact head over to audible.com slash tech quickie right now you can get yourself a free audiobook I listen to the one I'm falling asleep these headphones are great they actually stay in while I'm sleeping so it acts as noise cancellation for me as well and right now I am trying the first Twilight book which I can tell you guys so far is definitely helping me fall asleep but if you're not into Twilight don't worry there's thousands of other options on audible.com and the first one is free it always is so head over to audible.com slash tech wiki right now to check it out and learn more and as always guys don't forget to like this video share this video and subscribe to tech wiki for more fast as possible episodes just like this one