HDD Size Tool - Written for tvguy :P

[jr1]

i was IRC earlier this evening and tvguy wanted an app to calculate how many files of an average size he could fit onto a specified size harddrive.

anyways - thought i would post a link to the file for you all to see.

lettme know what you think :P

Download HDDSizeTool.rar

EDIT:: You'll need the vb6 runtime files, These Should Work

[blizz]

... how many files of an average size he could fit onto a specified size harddrive.

anyone else thinking of porn? :-P

[armadaender]

... how many files of an average size he could fit onto a specified size harddrive.

anyone else thinking of porn? :-P

I did for a second then realized that this tool could be useful for someone like me who has 50gb+ of music, 400gb+ of video, and needs to determine on what network drives would they best fit on.

And no, none of that is porn.

[cooper]

Call me a dumbass (I'm sure I deserve it) but wherein lies the difficulty here? The 1MB = 1000000 bytes thing?

[Cynagen]

Call me a dumbass (I'm sure I deserve it) but wherein lies the difficulty here? The 1MB = 1000000 bytes thing?

You're not the dumbass, it's the f'king harddrive manufacturers with their heads up their asses thinking they can get away with it now. (Not going to happen for much longer with drives getting bigger and more and more space going POOF)

Here's the classifications of measurements.

Consumer = 1024

Manufacturer = 1000

If you notice, there's a 24 byte disrepency. When harddrive manufacturers were first minting these larger drives (1gb+) they figured they could throw away a user measurement in favor of their own, just so they would not have to deal with trying to fit an extra 24xHOWMANYBYTES on the drive platters. This was also a marketing scam, and since people just attributed this to formatting the drive caused a loss in usable space for the partition mapping (total bullshit), the harddrive manufacturers got away with it for a while. Now that we're on the unprecidented and unbelievable brink of 1 f'king terabit (notice i say bit, i'll explain later) drives, these guys aren't going to get away with it much longer.

Manufacturers have long used Mb, which to those in the internet hosting realm understand as Megabit, and MB as MegaByte, but to the unsuspecting consumer, well they assume MegaByte. Here's the math, and we'll use a new 750Gb harddrive for example:

750 (label size) x 1000000000 = 750000000000 "bytes" (bit in the terms of internet transfer from most servers, when they list 12Gbit transfer, they mean 11.17GB transfer, again, marketing scam to screw you for going over your bandwidth limit)

Now let's format the drive! 1024^3 = 1073741824 bytes = 1 gigabyte (note no "s, this is literal to how a computer reads it!)

750000000000 / 1073741824 = 698.49193096161 (or as XP would report: 698.5GB)

Yeah, 750Gb on the label, 698GB usable. That's 50 "GB" lost, i'm sorry, but that's not a partition map, that's just bad math on the part of the manufacturer. The only drives i've seen listed with actual usable space sizes, are SCSI drives (because their primary domain is servers and you need to know exactly how much use this drive is going to be,) and the Raptors from Western Digital (the 80Gb raptor is marked on the box as 74GB which is what it will end up as once formatted.)

I have to give props to WD for their smart move on the Raptors, bad thing is, they should have set that example long ago, and made the rest of the companies follow suit by no longer lying.

[Darren Kitchen]

I love the whole bit vs byte thing when it comes to marketing people. I was once on a call with Cogent, a big ISP in north america (and elsewhere perhaps) and the pushy sales guy said "Come on, I can sell you a hundred meg line right now". To which I said "one hundred megabits or megabytes" and he said "yeah, that, one hundred megs. it's really fast". A few moments later he said "oh, there's a difference? hang on, I'll get one of our tech guys on the phone and maybe he can answer your question".

The sales guy didn't think it was a big deal. To him it was all about what sounded big. Hell, at home I have a 15 mbit cable connection which can download a "60 megabit file in 4 seconds"...

Honestly I'd much rather buy a 2 megabyte connection. Same thing (give or take) I know but really who downloads "60 megabit files"?

[SomeoneE1se]

I love the whole bit vs byte thing when it comes to marketing people. I was once on a call with Cogent, a big ISP in north america (and elsewhere perhaps) and the pushy sales guy said "Come on, I can sell you a hundred meg line right now". To which I said "one hundred megabits or megabytes" and he said "yeah, that, one hundred megs. it's really fast". A few moments later he said "oh, there's a difference? hang on, I'll get one of our tech guys on the phone and maybe he can answer your question".

5 that reminds me of the time I called up to get wireless internet and I asked "...how fast is the download and upload rate..." and the woman I was talking said "Oh well it's really fast I can tell you that..." thank god she put me on hold right after that becasue I started laughing. later I was joking with my firend "OH!! it's really fast well sign me the hell up!!!! I love that really fast internet"

[PoyBoy]

i like these really fast interwebs too!