4.7GB or not?

BlueMak · Jan 31, 2007, 06:18 AM

Can someone please tell me if it is normal to have DVD Rs discs that claim they have room for 4.7GB of data but only write about 4.3-4.4GB?
Or is my dvd recorder not working as it should?

~~DudeBoyz~~ · Jan 31, 2007, 06:25 AM

There is UNFORMATTED capacity and FORMATTED capacity.

It's a marketing lie - like 21" CRT's that only really have 20" diagonally, hard drives that say they are 120 gig but use a flat 1,000,000,000 instead of the proper 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024 megabytes)

Oh yeah, and breast implants - all the same thing...

heh.

H3X4D3C1M4L · Jan 31, 2007, 11:52 AM

What DudeBoyz said, but its not the formatting that does it. Its the fact that your hard drive manufacturers and now DVD manufacturer's are gimping out on the whole GB thing. Technically, a gigabyte in its purest form is 1,000,000,000 bytes. The definition the rest of the world has, is in base 2 due to the fact that computers don't speak binary, and the 'hoity-toity' correct way to say it is "gibibytes" or GiB, which is 1,073,741,824 bytes per gigabyte.

The math backs it up: 4700000000/1024/1024/1024 = 4482.269287109375 megabytes or ~4.4GB.

Zelig · Jan 31, 2007, 01:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by H3X4D3C1M4L

What DudeBoyz said, but its not the formatting that does it. Its the fact that your hard drive manufacturers and now DVD manufacturer's are gimping out on the whole GB thing. Technically, a gigabyte in its purest form is 1,000,000,000 bytes. The definition the rest of the world has, is in base 2 due to the fact that computers don't speak binary, and the 'hoity-toity' correct way to say it is "gibibytes" or GiB, which is 1,073,741,824 bytes per gigabyte.

The math backs it up: 4700000000/1024/1024/1024 = 4482.269287109375 megabytes or ~4.4GB.

Exactly.

Multiply GB by 0.931322574 to get the number of GiB (actual space) that the storage device actually holds.