I just bought a 2gb flashdrive from memorex. How come it says i only have a capacity of 1.92?

Question

I don't understand.

They should add more for the formatting- so we can use- it's not fair the we dont use the whole 2 gb

Answer 1

You are seeing the realities of marketing that has been going on since the early times of manuracturers (marketing department) generalizing the ratings for harddrives.

The marketing department has generalized capacities by saying that Kilobyte or 'K' equal 1000 bytes, a megabyte = 1000 Kilobytes and that a Gigabyte = 1000 megabytes.

In reality (according to your computer and the binary number system) Kilobyte or 'K' equal 1024 bytes, a megabyte = 1024 Kilobytes and that a Gigabyte = 1024 megabytes.

So marketing tends to overstate the capacity ignoring that they are about 2.34% overstating the capacity. So when memorex (and every other manufacturer for that matter) tells you your flash drive contains 2Gb they are saying that it contains 2000Mb. However when your computer adds up the capacity using the true 1024 per gigabyte it sees ~ 2000Mb and divided by 1024 = ~1.94 (true) Gigabytes.

So in other words, if you go to My Computer and right click on your USB drive and select properties you will probably see that it is reporting around something lik 2,083,059,138 bytes. Marketing (and the accepted business practice since the 90's), sees this and says "Look!, 2 billion bytes, that must mean 2 Gigabytes...let's print that on the package"

Answer 2

All 2gb drives will be 2.048gb unformatted, and have a smaller amount useable when formatted. That's just the way they're made. It's been that way since computer memory was invented.

Answer 3

The drive has formatting information on it so that it will work with most products. This will use up some of the space.

Answer 4

all storage devices do that

I bought 120Gb harddisk and only got 114Gb of usable space.

My flash drive is 256mB and i only have 244MB.

Answer 5

wow dumbass thats stored basic mem to make it work for one and for two -.08 isnt a big loss..infact its so minimal you should shut the f u c k up

Answer 6

You got ripped off.