🚀 go-pugleaf

>> The marketing people at maxtor (and other drives), use the mathematical 
>> definition to describe their drive capacities. So your 160GB drive holds 
>> 160,000,000,000 Bytes (mathematically accurate). Windows reports drive 
>> sizes using the other definition, so to windows your drive holds 160 / 
>> 2^30 = 149GB.
>>
>> Strange but true - the only industry or dicipline in the world where 
>> 160GB = 149GB! But this is probably where you are 'losing' over 10GB of 
>> space. The answer is that you aren't losing the space, its just windows 
>> reporting the size wrongly.
>>
> I would say Windows is reporting it correctly, the Manufacturers have 
> changed the way of SELLING hard drive space.

And you are not alone in being brainwashed by microsoft! This is the big 
debate - one that tends to end it threads going 30+ replies deep and never 
actually getting anywhere!

Nobody can argue with this mathematically accurate statement:
160,000,000,000 => 160 x 10^9

The problem for some people (microsoft) is when we introduce the recognised 
scientific exponential abbreviation for 10^9, Giga:
160,000,000,000 => 160 x 10^9 => 160GB

As you can see, I side with the mathematicians and agree that windows has 
got it wrong because Giga means 10^9 for any numerical expression of 
quantity. Similarly, Mega means 10^6 and Kilo means 10^3.