Hacking Actual capacity of a kingston 4GB micro sd card?

[Insane_Cat]

Does a 4GB card actually hold 4 Gigabytes? I know that a lot of times there small print on memory devices saying "actual formatted capacity may be less", so how much space am I really getting?

 

[Midna]

Probably about 3.8GB. It's like that with everything.

 

[tk_saturn]

You''ll have the overhead for the filesystem, and they use 1000's instead of 1,024's.

4GB * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = 4,000,000,000
4,000,000,000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 3.72GB

So around 3.7GB.

 

[N4RU70 FR34K]

You're probably getting 3.69 gb that's how much is on mine hope this helps

 

[Nimbus]

See, the thing is.

Manufacturers usually put on their packaging that say for example 1000 MB = 1GB, or 1 Billion Bytes is 1GB

This is completely incorrect. 1000 MB =/= 1GB, and 1 Billion Bytes exact isn't a Gigabyte either

1 GB=1024 MB (mega bytes)
1 MB=1024 KB(kilobytes)
1 KB=1024 bytes

1 GB=1024*1024*1024 bytes

So, really in fact 1GB = 1073741824 bytes

So, technically you aren't getting 4GB total. You will probably get about 3.7-3.9 GB out of it.

See computers process everything in Binary, which goes in sets of octets, or 8's, shown below. This is the correct way to measure capacity on storage devices,

As much as I wish that manufacturers would not list the capacity in such as decieving way, however who in their right mind would buy a 3.7GB Micro SD.

This same concept applies to any storage device, thumb drives, hard drives, etc.

The only thing that usually will have the exact amount are Optical Media such as CD-R/RW/ETC, DVD-R/RW/ETC, Blu-Ray (Lol, good luck finding burnable Blu-Ray Disks let alone burning hardware for them), and other forms of optical media.

Congrats if anyone beats me to this post, I'll fry you with my Third-Leg later.

EDIT: tk_saturn, I don't think the overhead has anything to do with the capacity. I may be wrong though.

 

[Insane_Cat]

Thank you everybody, you have confirmed my suspicions.
I wish that the manufacturers wouldn't lie like this, but it saves them a tiny amount of money.

 

[Midna]

It's far worse when they try to sell you a 8Gb MicroSD Card.

 

[fearofshorts]

Ugh. I hate it when people sell things in *b.
Gb is GigaBit. This is roughly 1/8th of a GB (GigaByte).

We have some pretty stupid units in IT, huh?