Western Digital Sucks
So.. One would think that even in “Hard Drive Marketing Speak” 250GB (250 * 10^9) would == 250,000,000,000 bytes, which while substantially (18,435,356,000 bytes) smaller than 250GiB (250 * 2^30 == 268,435,456,000) would be common for all drives carrying the capacity statement of 250GB.
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte for more on Metric vs Binary units)
Ah, but this is indeed not so. No, not even close.
Maxtor’s 250GB drives have an LBA of 490,234,752 sectors. Now sectors are 512 bytes in size, so a simple division brings us to a capacity of 245,117,376 GiB (roughly 5GiB from 250… which is acceptable loss in the metric to binary unit conversion)
Western Digital, however in their infinite wisdom gives us an LBA of 488,397,168 which gives us a capacity of 244,198,584 GiB.
Some more simple math shows us that Western Digital is actually shorting us 918,792 MiB vs the Maxtor drive.
Of course most people won’t care, I mean hell Windows XP needs almost that much space to install, but those of us trying to resynch a RAID-5 array are going to be very upset.
Tags: General