1024mb, 2048mb....

[Bobsf40]

Have you seen any 1gig SD cards which actually give you one full gig worth of storage? I know most companies crap out and measure differently as to lower their costs.

If you card is '1gig' or 2gigs, how much data can it actually store, and what brand is it?

[Howard2k]

It's not a cost issue.

It can be well argued that the correct definition of 1 Gigabtye is 1,000,000,000 Bytes. It's the fact that our computers count the data storage in binary that causes the problem. Hence we computer tells us that 1GB is 1,073,741,824 bytes, not 1,000,000,000 bytes.

When using the terms outside of the exclusive data storage discussion, we use them in increments of 1,000. Kilometre for distance. Gigabit for data transfers etc.

So the simple answer is that the storage cards manufacturers are selling 1GB and giving 1GB. Just that your computer is using a different definition. In short though, I don't know of any that sell 1,024MB as 1GB.

[Haesslich]

You have to remember that we count things differently than computers do - 1024MB is technically one gigabyte, although usually drive sellers and users like to keep things simple by saying a thousand megs is a gig. It's not a cost issue, so much as it's easier to refer to and remember 1000 than 1024 as being 'a gigabyte' or a million KB.

However, if you've found your 1GB card has actually 973.18MB of storage space available, then that's a technical issue more than anything: the FAT tables take up the remaining 50MB on the drive, and the cluster size will affect how much available storage is present as well.

[Bobsf40]

When I refered to it as a cost issue, I meant that they could get away with giving us less memory and still call it 1GB, even though so many of us are used 1024MB. The general public on the other hand has no idea how a computer actually counts.

I always just felt a bit ripped off, thats all

[Haesslich]

When I refered to it as a cost issue, I meant that they could get away with giving us less memory and still call it 1GB, even though so many of us are used 1024MB. The general public on the other hand has no idea how a computer actually counts.

I always just felt a bit ripped off, thats all

Again, it's not a cost issue - it's your FAT tables which contribute to the 'less than 1GB' problem, as well as the fact that most everyone refers to a gig as 1000MB, rather than 1024MB - although the card would come with 1024MB anyways. The fact that your 1GB card shows 973MB available is due to the fact your FAT tables will take up more space, the bigger the memory device gets, and that there are two tables there for redundancy, so if one table gets corrupted you don't lose everything on that storage card. A lot of disk-recovery programs use data from both tables to do their repairs, after all. There's also the minimum cluster size to consider here, which will affect the amount of usable space you have left after writing in some files.

For example, I have a 4GB microdrive - that 4GB microdrive provides 3898.33 usable storage space, even though it technically has around 4096MB of storage; the rest goes to the FAT tables. Even if the actual capacity of the drive was 4000MB, I'd still have lost the remaining space to the file structure as well as the size of clusters used in formatting the drive - the bigger the minimum cluster size, the more usable space I lose, as even a 1KB file would be the same size as the cluster, which could get up to 32KB with FAT32.

[coach_ng]

So the simple answer is that the storage cards manufacturers are selling 1GB and giving 1GB. Just that your computer is using a different definition. In short though, I don't know of any that sell 1,024MB as 1GB.

kingston elite cards sell as 1024mb

[Haesslich]

kingston elite cards sell as 1024mb

I have one of those myself - but most hard drive manufacturers follow the '1000000K = 1GB' standard, and most storage manufacturers tend to follow them... although the drives usually have the 'standard' 1024/2048/4096/8192MB of space, or fall within a few dozen megs of that.

[axzilla]

I just bought a 250gig external hard drive but when connected to my computer there is only 233gigs availiabe for use so they cheated me out of 17gig. Just kidding lol but you get the idea

[Howard2k]

kingston elite cards sell as 1024mb

From Kingston's website:

††† 1 Megabyte(MB) = 1,000,000 bytes; 1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1,000,000,000 bytes

[Howard2k]

Haesslich>

The FAT is not taking up 50MB. I assume that these gents are referring to freshly formatted media in which case the FAT is close to empty. The FAT takes up more space as the card fills up. It does not take up 50MB (for example) from day 1.

SD media also includes overheard for the security features built into the SD standard.

[coach_ng]

ok then, they lable it as 1024mb

[Howard2k]

ok then, they lable it as 1024mb

Oh cool, I must have missed that one on their website. Admittedly I only had a cursory look.