Recently, I bought a 250GB hard drive just as a muck-around drive. I didn’t really need it at the time but as someone once said (well, they should have said it if they didn’t), too much hard drive space is barely enough.

A few days later, I installed it and formatted it just to give it a bit of a test run. After I formatted it, I checked the capacity of the drive under Windows Explorer and knock me down, the thing only has 232GB available.

I’d briefly forgotten that hard drive manufacturers and operating system vendors have yet to agree on a fairly fundamental thing – what constitutes a kilobyte of space. Is it 1000 bytes or is it 1024 bytes?

It doesn’t sound like much of a difference but in these days of mega-capacity hard drives, it’s quickly adding up to serious missing gigabytes of storage.

Hard drive manufacturers rate the capacity of their hard drives in “GB” however to them, a gigabyte is simply 1,000,000,000 bytes whereas to the operating system vendors, it’s more like 1,073,741,824 bytes and its quickly leading to a significant differences.

A “500GB” hard drive will only give you 464GB and if you buy a new “1000GB” hard drive, expect Windows to tell you you’re only getting 928GB.

In the old days, when drives were barely measured in gigabytes, it hardly mattered but it’s about time operating system builders and hard drive manufacturers started singing from the same song sheet. As drive capacities continue to sprint along, this is a problem that is only going to grow steadily worse.

Quite frankly, I don’t care which way it goes – 1000 bytes, 1024 bytes, it doesn’t really matter in the end unless you’re a purist. What matters is consistency.

If you create a 4.7GB video file to fit on a single-layer DVD, it should bloody well fit. You shouldn’t have to remember that DVDs are like hard drives and that in Windows, you really need to be thinking “4.38GB” as your file limit.

The confusion does nothing to help make computing an easier task for the average user and it does nothing for the credibility of either camp when the consumer feels as though they’ve been ripped off and not getting what they paid for.

So listen up, hard drive vendors, operating system builders – shake hands, kiss and make up, do whatever it is you have to do but for goodness sake, can we nail down exactly what is a gigabyte these days?

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