bites etc

[lord molly]

y when i look on my laptop hard drive, it will say 40.00Gb, and in brackets, 37,998,644,086 surely this is 37.99Gb?

[Ethel]

Yes.

[lord molly]

i ment, to add- why is this so?

[mikeyp]

Well actually there are 1024 bytes in a kb and kb in a mb etc. So this is actually 35.39Gb. I think memory is lost in the filing system, which allows searching, directories, file permissions etc. You'll never get quite as much as the disk can provide for your own files.

[fo3nix]

mikeyp's right.

First of all, the 40GB you've quoted is a decimal value. Computers count in binary, 0's and 1's, and so where as in decimal 1GB = 1000MB, in binary 1GiB = 1024MiB.

If you divide 40000 by 1024, you'll get 39GiB.

The other stuff can be accounted for as mikey says: the file system itself takes up a small amount of room (different depending on the filesystem in use).

[fo3nix]

Further, if you want to be even more precise (i.e., correct), try taking the number of bits in a GiB:

1024^3

and dividing 40GB, that is 40,000,000,000 by it.

you'll get the number 37.25290298462GiB, which is damn near your number that you get (not even factoring in the filesystem stuff).