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Ask HN: What is the rationale behind USB stick makers “cheating” customers?

2 points by flyGuyOnTheSly ↗ HN
I get it... the manufacturers assume 1,024 bytes per megabyte while most every computer in the world assumes 1,000 bytes per megabyte.

I don't mind that my brand new 64GB USB only has 62GB of usable space, at least as far as my OS sees it.

But most customers are not as computer savvy as me.

The end result is that most customers probably feel cheated when plugging in their brand new product, while the manufacturer "saves" 2.4% of extra memory they did not have to put into the usb stick.

Is the USB stick manufacturing industry really that cut throat? Does +/-2.4% in costs really make that big of a difference? And does that 2.4% savings affect customer retention at all?

Are there any manufacturers out there forgo the 2.4% cost savings and give the customer what they expect to see?

The backside packaging of the 64GB kingston USB I just purchased dedicates approximately 50% of the packaging real estate to explain that "Actual available capacity for data storage is less than as listed on the products..." (in about 10 different languages).

It all just seems to petty.

5 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 16.4 ms ] thread
kazishariar
It's all shits and giggles until you realize that on the day you decide to keep off premises backups of your production environment on the day off and you realize you short sided on that. It might not be the case with an enterprise-y budget, but when working with SMB's/start-ups, so small shops think photos, videos, music, even accountants, and healthcare. It's more of a gotcha that people need to plan and forecastfor, as you said people should be more computer savvy, but sometimes when you order tomatoes, you don't tomahtohs.
gus_massa
Nobody cares. The OS use some part for the FAT table or whatever equivalent thing, the USB may came with some "free" program to have a fancy ico (why?!) and other stuff like that. So 64GB means more than 60GGB or something.
echeese
Two reasons:

1.) The "actual available capacity" is likely referring to how it needs to store information about the filesystem on the device, so you can't use it to store, say, a 64 GiB file on it.

2.) There's been confusion as to whether a kilobyte, megabyte, etc is a multiple of 1000 or 1024. Because of this the same file will show a different size depending on whether you're using Windows or Mac. kilo- as a prefix denotes multiplication by a thousand, but tradition has made it necessary to introduce the kibibyte, mebibyte, etc.

neuralRiot
I thought you were referring to those $15 1Tb sticks.