Storage Capacity Disclaimer
The available capacity of your SimpleTech storage product will be reported by your operating system as less than what is listed on the product. There are two main reasons for this discrepancy:
1) There are two different definitions for reporting capacity
The storage industry, including hard disk drive and flash memory card manufacturers, generally define 1 MB as 1 million bytes, while Operating Systems commonly use the binary numbering system to define 1 Megabyte (MB) as 1,048,576 bytes or 1,024 kilobytes (KB). For example: a storage product labeled as providing 100GB of capacity actually has 100,000,000,000 bytes of storage, but an operating system, using the binary numbering system, may display the capacity as 93.13GB.
2) The formatted capacity of a storage product is less than the unformatted capacity
Storage products need to be properly formatted before the storage capacity can be accessed. When the storage product is formatted, a portion of the storage capacity, commonly called overhead, is used by the operating environment and is unavailable for storage. Maximum unformatted capacity, also known as drive byte capacity before formatting, is the (# Cylinders) x (# Heads) x (# Sectors) x (# Bytes per Track). For example, an unformatted 64MB SimpleTech Secure Digital Card has actual storage capacity of 64,225,280 bytes [490 Cylinders x 8 Heads x 32 Sectors x 512 Bytes per Track= 64,225,280 bytes], but after formatting the available capacity will be less than 64,225,280 bytes depending on the operating environment.
