my hriders.com account refuses to let me log in anymore, and it looks slightly insecure. oh well...

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Quote Originally Posted by silent ben
unlike gmails fake (1000 Mb) Gigabyte, theres really 1024 MB in a gigabyte, but its rounded to 1000 MB, thats why your hdd's are smaller than they say
gmail claim they give you 1000MB, seeing as mine says 'You are currently using 1023 MB (102%) of your 1000 MB.' i guess they lie.

your hard drives are smaller than they claim they are because nobody can get their units correct. hard drive manufaturers are correct in stating that their 160GB (gigabyte) drive is 160GB. it contains 160*(10^9) bytes (160,000,000,000 bytes) - Giga means '10^9', because it's a base-10 SI prefix.

Microsoft Windows (and other operating systems) use the wrong units. So in your image XA04, the 'GB's should read as 'GiB' meaning gibibytes, because that's what they really are.

160GiB means 160 * (2^30) which is about 171,798,691,800 bytes. Quite a difference.

kilo, mega, giga etc. are base-10 prefixes. data is stored as binary, or base-2, so these prefixes are incorrect. read more about this here.