DVD Capacity

[g4s]

I just bought 4 blank DVD, wanna backup all my files on harddisk. They are from Maxell, 4.7GB. The strange thing is that they all have a capacity of 4.38GB(Alcohol) or 4.43GB(Nero). Can anyone tell me why is this? Thanks.

[biohazerd87]

Because windows file systems work different and really weird, like if you buy a 120 gig harddrive it will only reconize like 115 or something like that, plus depending on the files you put on it, like a 700 MB cd can really hold almost 730MB depending on what you put on it

[sPlOrYgOn]

wrong.. it's actually the HDD company that is wrong.. well they were wrong until the last few years.. now windows is wrong..
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) decided to change the confusion in people new to computers thinking that they lost a few megs..
a kilobyte was actually 1024 bytes
and a megabyte was 1024 kilobytes.. and so on..
but the HDD manufacturers instead counted a kilobyte as 1000 bytes and a Megabyte as 1000 kilobytes which is actually correct since kilo means 10^3 and Mega means 10^6..
so IEEE decides to stop the confusion and now they have renamed the 1024 bytes to kibibyte instead of kilobyte and 1024 kibibytes is now a Mebibyte and 1024 Mebibytes is now Gibibytes.
so now windows is wrong because they are still saying 1024 Megabytes is 1 Gigabyte which should now be Mebibyte and Gibibyte.
their abbreviations are:
kiB for kibiByte.
MiB for MebiByte.
GiB for GibiByte.
TiB for TebiByte.
PiB for PebiByte.
but I do not think this change is widely accepted.. I've only seen Bittorrent clients with this new labeling...

but I do not know why nero and alcohol count the number of Mebibytes differently..

[-=RAV=-AdrianShephard]

wierd good way to friggin mess my brain up good game rofl jk.

[Cpl. Shrike]

Mebibytes rofl..

I sinsirly hope this is not gunna be a "used" standard. o_O
(changing KiloByte to 1000 Byte) <---- bad idea
Next thing ppl compain my 1Byte is not 10bits where did the rest go ??

[Exilibur]

and i guess the bi in kibibytes would stand for binary?

i guess that would make more sense, in a logic but inconveniencing way...

I don't like the idea of bending because of the companies though... that would be like making ie's screwed up version of html the international standard, bringing chaos and destruction upon all of us...

[>BKA< T Wrecks]

Hehe, these units sound like "babybite", "maybebite", "ladybite" "newbiebyte"... But thx for the info, sPlO!

[Onno Kreuzinger]

dvd image is in old GB=4,3 net, gross is 4,7 GB
difference comes from fs info and the differece beteween what is posssibel with the dye and what is made in the standart
so ypu wont get more than 4,3 old fashioned GBytes onto the disk.

b.t.w. whats an inch, a gallon and a stone = invalid since mid 70' ies, all over the world
so if Gibibytes will evolve as fast as the metric system it can take a century or so
(do you remember nonexistent 1.44mb floppy disks, still in all bios'es, allthoug it was _never_ correct, not a single day)

*don't we all just love marketing

[sPlOrYgOn]

I actually think this is a good change so companies can't cheat new people because pretty soon they're going to say they got a terabyte harddrive for sale and with this confusion they're obviously going to choose the one that will trick people in to thinking they have a bigger harddrive capacity than they really do and give bigger and bigger numbers but as the numbers get bigger the difference between terabyte and tebibyte get bigger and people WILL notice a lot of space "missing"..

Originally Posted by Cpl. Shrike

Next thing ppl compain my 1Byte is not 10bits where did the rest go ??

uhh... 1 Byte is 8 bits or 7 bits depending on your system..

[TruB]

they choosed to use bits instead of byte when they started with bandwidth.. like 56 kbits modem.. 1 mbit speed.

its sounds alot more.. then say 7kb modem or 225 kb speed (dont remember at the moment exact number)



1 byte is 8 bits.. that is the formula ive been told..
what system uses 7 bits in a byte?