I GOT RIPPED OFF!!!?

Question

i bought an external hard drive from walmart that is supposed to be 360 GB but when i plugged it into the computer it said total size 297 GB...they took out 63 gigabytes (over 15,000 songs). The question is why do they take out so much memory?

Answer 1

i get ripped even for an eraser man then go back to that exactly store and tell them wut happend

Answer 2

360gb is just the name of it. In reality it is actually only 300gb (297), lol. It's just a marketing scheme and unfortunately you have to be aware. But, now you know!

Answer 3

it is because of the way computers read data , it is different to the way companies advertise data space, companies say there are 1000 mb in a gb but to a pc there are 1024mb to a gb, welcome to the binary world

Answer 4

It's because all computers read the data differently... you didn't get ripped off that's how it should be. It's the difference of 1,000kb and 1,024kb. While it actually has 1,024 your computer reads 1,000.

Answer 5

Most of them are like that. It's kind of a rip, I agree. You should take it and burn it in front of Wal-Mart in protest and then demand they pay for five new ones for you.

Answer 6

join the club

my ipod is supposed to be 80gb but its 74gb

its always like that

Answer 7

Most external drives have software running on them already 63 gigs is a lot.  I just bought a 500 GB I need find out how much I really have thanks!!

Answer 8

A computer reads a hard drives' space differently.  You didnt get ripped off.  

Answer 9

360gb is unformatted. 297 is formatted. hard drive sizes are always advertised in there unformatted capacity which is really dumb because it is unusable if it isnt formatted!

Answer 10

Well you buy certain things it already has stuff installed on it for example an ipod,it may be 4 gbs but it comes with things already installed...

Answer 11

It's never as large as they say since some space must be taken up with firmware and the such, though 60gb sounds like a lot to be missing.  Try EASEUS partition manager to see if Windows just isn't recognizing the whole drive.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/07/08...

Answer 12

idk...they are messed up though i don't know what to say but i'm really really srry...even though i wasn't even involed in it well i'm srry bout the hole song thing..i'm not that smart with tecno. stuff...srry...

Answer 13

It takes memory to have it pluged in, and working. It's normal.. I bought a 1GB and its 897mbs....  

Answer 14

life isnt fair another life lesson learned!

i bought a dog whistle on amazon it dosent work i mean you can here it but the dog dosent pay attention to it

Answer 15

For one, it's WAL-MART and I think they actually do that to a lot of things.

When I got an iPod I only had a 4gb which should hold 1,000 songs but mine only holds 755. I was pissssed.  

Answer 16

they prob didnt take it out

the memory was prob taken

up by the programs that makes

the external hard drive work.

does dat help ? =]

Answer 17

That is way too much to be explained away as anything but a rip off; return for replacement; 355 GB is a reasonable number in a stated 360 GB drive.

Answer 18

Slow down, let's first consider the standard Hard Drive problem.

When hard drive manufacturers produce drives they sell the drives using the definition of 1 kilobyte as 1000 bytes . When your computer reads the drive, it defines 1 kilobyte as 1024 (2^10) bytes.

So take the advertised size and convert it from Gigabytes to bytes, using the manufacturers math. 360GB * 1000MB * 1000KB * 1000B = 360,000,000,000 bytes. That number IS the actual size of your drive. 360 Billion Bytes. However, your Operating System (OS) does math a little differently. So let's convert BACK to GB using OS math.

360,000,000,000B / 1024KB / 1024MB / 1024GB = 335.276GB. So you are a little short.

What I did note though, is if you do the same math for a 320GB drive, you get 297GB right on the dot. So the long and short of it is, the size is due to a difference in math, which is NORMAL for ALL drives. And the second problem is you got sold a drive that was 40GB smaller than they told you it was.

Answer 19

Well one thing you can do is format your flash drive, and that might clear up some room, but memoryy is taken to laucnh the flash drive and for your computer to recognize it. MAke sure there aren't any programs or anything installed on the flash drive.  

Answer 20

That's not unusual.

The harddisk inside the unit is spec'd at 360GB.  BUT, the harddisk manufacturers typically label their disk using 1GB=1,000,000,000BYTES.  However, your computer uses different system.  1GB=1024MB, 1MB=1024KB, 1KB=1024Bytes.  As a result, there are huge descrepancies.  ALSO when you format the disk and create a filesystem, you would easily lose 10% or more for the overhead.

This "overhead" is used to store such things as file names, link lists (which stores which data belongs to which file and where they are physically stored), and redunduncy for error corrections and recoveries.  These are necessary part of using disks on computers.  Because of these overhead, the area usable for data storage (for you) is smaller than the actual specification.

This is true for any diskdrives, internal or external.