A few days ago, my aunt ask me to buy her an external portable hard drive for backups.
She’s an accounting freelancer and works mainly in a laptop computer. To prevent loosing data she makes periodical accounting data backups.
I ask her to see the backup data size and is small … very small, so … I decide to buy her a small capacity 2,5´´ external hard drive.
Here is the chosen one: [more]
As you can see, I choose a 80GB capacity drive.
I decided to try it and see if it is working fine.
The first thing I checked was the disk capacity.
Here is what I found:
The external disk properties tell me that disk capacity was 74,5 GB.
I simply plug it to my laptop and do nothing more … so I can only think that Maxtor is messing with his costumers pocket.
I know that many people don’t know that bytes aren’t metric like numbers.
- 1K byte = 1024 byte not 1000 byte
So, you can say that 80.023.715.840 potatoes are 80G potatoes but when referring to bytes you must have 85.899.345.920 byte to say you have 80G byte.
If you make a simple calculation you will find that customers are getting 6,875%(5,5 GB) less storage capacity than what they paid for.
Naturally, if Maxtor keep is calculus rule the same for larger capacity disks then customers will get even less percent than my case.
My advice is only one:
Before you buy an external hard drive ask the vendor to show you the drive in action and check it’s real capacity.
