128 GB Surface Pro Features 83 GB of Free Space

[Guest]

[citation][nom]merloin[/nom]I know people are going to complain about the space being used but I honestly don't understand the problem. It's like any disk space, a portion get's used by the OS.Some may complain that how much space is used is too much but to me, it seems right on par with the desktop variant.You buy a 128 GB drive, and once formatted, eats away 8GB alone. Then by the time you install the base OS and some applications, I imagine it'd be close to the 85 - 90 GB remaining range, if not a little less.[/citation]
Well, 128 GB drive is actually 119.2 GB when you consider that 1000 1024 difference, but that still means OS takes up 36 GB which is inexcusable. I'm sure with appropriate Linux distribution you could have well over 100 GB of those 119.2 GB free.

 

[bystander]

[citation][nom]sublime2k[/nom]Well, 128 GB drive is actually 119.2 GB when you consider that 1000 1024 difference, but that still means OS takes up 36 GB which is inexcusable. I'm sure with appropriate Linux distribution you could have well over 100 GB of those 119.2 GB free.[/citation]
That depends on what standard you use. Most people here like to remember how 1024kb was a MB, but that is not the only standard that has been used.

International System of Units (SI) and the International Electrotechnical Commission IEC consider a GB as 10^9. It is confusing for sure. Personally, I'm fine with storage devices using this term, as it doesn't gain any advantage using the 2^30 definition. RAM on the other hand, more naturally uses 2^30.

 

[InvalidError]

[citation][nom]bystander[/nom]Personally, I'm fine with storage devices using this term, as it doesn't gain any advantage using the 2^30 definition. RAM on the other hand, more naturally uses 2^30.[/citation]
Flash chips just like memory tend to have capacity scaling in powers of two simply because the address decoder takes an integer number of address bits and therefore the number of rows/columns/banks within the chip scales as a power of two - unless the SSD controller has a non-power-of-two data channels configuration not including extra channels used for ECC/FEC.

Conventional HDDs on the other hand have arbitrary storage geometry (variable in modern drives) so the power-of-two thing is meaningless there, the only thing that is going to be power-of-two on the platters is the usable sector size, 512b in old drives, 4096b in new ones.

As for the confusion, that's why the IEEE strongly recommends using KiB, MiB, etc. instead of abusing metric prefixes.

 

[Guest]

[citation][nom]bystander[/nom]That depends on what standard you use. Most people here like to remember how 1024kb was a MB, but that is not the only standard that has been used.International System of Units (SI) and the International Electrotechnical Commission IEC consider a GB as 10^9. It is confusing for sure. Personally, I'm fine with storage devices using this term, as it doesn't gain any advantage using the 2^30 definition. RAM on the other hand, more naturally uses 2^30.[/citation]
Well, that is the standard most (if not all) storage manufacturers use these days and I'm guessing that's the case with Surface as well.

What I usually do is multiply advertised capacity in gigabytes with 1000^3 and then divide with 1024^3 which end up as roughly 93% of advertised capacity.

 

[bystander]

[citation][nom]sublime2k[/nom]Well, that is the standard most (if not all) storage manufacturers use these days and I'm guessing that's the case with Surface as well.What I usually do is multiply advertised capacity in gigabytes with 1000^3 and then divide with 1024^3 which end up as roughly 93% of advertised capacity.[/citation]
Why bother? Almost all storage devices use 1000^3, wouldn't it just be simpler to just go along and compare them all in the manner they are displayed?

RAM still uses the 1024 idea, that doesn't mean you have to use that for everything.

 

[bystander]

[citation][nom]InvalidError[/nom]Flash chips just like memory tend to have capacity scaling in powers of two simply because the address decoder takes an integer number of address bits and therefore the number of rows/columns/banks within the chip scales as a power of two - unless the SSD controller has a non-power-of-two data channels configuration not including extra channels used for ECC/FEC.Conventional HDDs on the other hand have arbitrary storage geometry (variable in modern drives) so the power-of-two thing is meaningless there, the only thing that is going to be power-of-two on the platters is the usable sector size, 512b in old drives, 4096b in new ones.As for the confusion, that's why the IEEE strongly recommends using KiB, MiB, etc. instead of abusing metric prefixes.[/citation]
SSD are also storage devices, just like HDD's, so it does make sense, and makes things much easier to stick with the convention. Since we all know all storage devices follow the typical metric system, it is much easier to compare. The only reason 1024 became a KB, was it was a power of 2 that worked well with RAM.

 

[Guest]

[citation][nom]bystander[/nom]Why bother? Almost all storage devices use 1000^3, wouldn't it just be simpler to just go along and compare them all in the manner they are displayed?RAM still uses the 1024 idea, that doesn't mean you have to use that for everything.[/citation]
Comparing? Yeah, sure. But we're not comparing anything in this article. The fact is Surface "128GB" has 30% of space taken by OS and "64GB" has even more, 60%.

 

[jl0329]

Some MS fan boy is giving everyone who isn't please with the 45 GB garbage thumb down. I almost thought I stepped into an Apple article. If this is an apple product that waste 45GB, people here will rain hell on it.

Anyway, I don't have a problem with it taking almost 40% of my usable space as long as they state that in their product description. It's going to deceive a lot of common people who doesn't follow tech sites. Now days, people are expecting at least 90% of the space to be usable.

Also, windows (without office as they stated) really shouldn't take that much space....

 

[bystander]

[citation][nom]sublime2k[/nom]Comparing? Yeah, sure. But we're not comparing anything in this article. The fact is Surface "128GB" has 30% of space taken by OS and "64GB" has even more, 60%.[/citation]
Again, why would you want to translate a number if they aren't compared and all storage devices use that terminology? It is what it is.