I've heard a lot of people complain that hard drive/flash drive manufacturers lie about the size of the disk (both at school and on the net). People say this because if you right click on a 160 GB hard drive, it actually reports as a 149 GB hard drive.
You might now think that you got ripped off by 11 GB, but this is in fact untrue. The reason behind this is that manufacturers use the decimal system to calculate the size of the disk while Windows uses the binary system to calculate the size of the disk.
It so happens that 2 ^10th power is almost 1000 (it's 1024) and 2 ^20th power is almost 1 million (1,048,576) and 2 ^30th power is almost 1 billion (1,073,741,824). A kilobyte is 1000 bytes to person counting in decimal and 1024 bytes to a person using the binary representations. The only thing common to the two measurement systems is the size of a byte.
Now you might think that the manufacturers are using the most beneficial numbers to rate their products, but that's not true. If you use the decimal system you know exactly how many bytes your hard drive will hold without having to think about it. If you use the binary representation, you have to do a calculation to figure the exact number of bytes your hard drive will hold.
So in short. Windows uses a different measurement system than what manufacturers use.
Note: info confirmed at and 'taken' from http://www.dslreports.com/faq/9716
something that bugs me...
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