[jqp]

I am finally powering up and formatting my last 2 250 GB SATA Drives to give me a total of 1TB. I found a local computer store that sells the cables (data/signal and power) for $3 and I finally drove out there at rush hour and picked them up.

Except that these drives end up formatting to 233 GB each  and of course we know this is the industry standard for rounding up.

Later this weekend I will probably add an IDE drive cage to put me over the top for real.

I have 1 IDE channel for a Master and Slave. My DVD burner is on one so I will have to think about the practicalities...

[JohninCR]

I guess we have to redefine when almost counts.  It used to be only for atomic bombs and hand grenades, but in your case we'll let you round up and make it okay for storage too.  btw I saw a 1T drive for $399 the other day, so I'm just biding my time multiple T's to be cheap.  I read 300T drives will be out by 2010, so a handfull of T's should get really cheap, really soon.

[jqp]

these 4 250GB drives were $85 each - had to get them installed before it wasn't a deal...

[shokunin]

A single 1TB drive is not yet available, hopefully in a couple of months from Hitachi and Seagate.  I wish we could see 300TB by 2010, but that's 400x the largest drive available today.  We'd be lucky if drives double in capacity each year.

[JohninCR]

shokunin,

You are right, my idiot geek employee told me 300T, but he slipped a digit.  I think I'll slip a digit on his next paycheck, in my favor of course.  I'm starting to run short on space with about .5T now.  Hopefully the 1T's will knock the 750gb prices down a notch or 2, but they're not too bad right now at below $350/ea.  I want to get down to just 2 drives with one being only backup.

[Inscrutable]

and of course we know this is the industry standard for rounding up

It is not a rounding issue, but a case of the marketers taking liberties with the actual math (hard to believe).

The short story is that a true megabyte (as far as your computer is concerned) is actually 2^20 = 1,048,576 bytes.  But the hard drive mfrs have taken to a base ten naming convention, in which a megabyte is now 10^6 = 1,000,000 bytes.  So you come up about 5% short from the nominal capacity.

[JohnR]

my idiot geek employee told me...

Good to see you have a good working relationship with your employees. Well done. Let's hope they aren't reading this 

[BobM]

You want to hear about a travesty wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a mystery ... about storage? 

We had to buy some WORM (write once - read many) storage for a very large project at work. 14 TB of it is needed annually !!!! (it's a trading system and we need to keep absolutely everything for compliance). After installation and formatting of the space, and loading of the drivers and application to run the damn thing, what's left over is 7.8 TB of usable space for our records. DAMN, that's almoist a 50% loss uf usable space.

There's no practical explaination for this except that certain things that were loaded have to be in separate partitions, per the process police, and that's how much needs to be allocated to do this. It's damn unholy to think that this can't be some little process clerk flexing his muscle to the tune of 6.2 TB. I would be hard pressed to think that there's even 1 TB of actual disk with anything on it. But 7.8 TB is what we're left with before we even put 1 spec of our own data on it.

Enjoy,
Bob

[ctviggen]

It is not a rounding issue, but a case of the marketers taking liberties with the actual math (hard to believe).

The short story is that a true megabyte (as far as your computer is concerned) is actually 2^20 = 1,048,576 bytes.  But the hard drive mfrs have taken to a base ten naming convention, in which a megabyte is now 10^6 = 1,000,000 bytes.  So you come up about 5% short from the nominal capacity.

This is exactly correct, although formatting also takes its toll.  (You have to store the name of the file and links from the beginning of the file to the end.)  The formatting of the drive itself is generally stored on the drive, too (though it's not a lot of info.).  I have 4 300 GB hard drives for a total of about 1.2 TB.