I am a happy man

[ssal]

I got a refurbished 256 gb Crucial SSD two years ago and I swaped it out with the 1TB HHD from my new Toshiba Satellite. I was concern about the remaining disk space but I was able to manage for two years. I had to move some of the older photo files to the external backup hard disk. I believe, two years ago, the 256 gb SSD was over $200.

It got to the point I have only 10 gb left on the old SSD and I decided it is time to bite the bullet. The Samsung EVO 850, 500 gb is around $180, that makes it easy. I got it the next day after I placed the order. It came with the Samsung Migration DVD, which was very painless to clone from the old drive. Took about two hours and I swapped the drives and Bingo, it is not having around 235 gb free space. I think that would last me another 3-5 years. And by then. 1TB would probably be in the area of under $200.

I don't quite understand why Window Explorer reported only 465 gb on a drive that the manufacturer claimed 500 gb. Where is the rest of the 35 gb?

 

[johnb35]

I don't quite understand why Window Explorer reported only 465 gb on a drive that the manufacturer claimed 500 gb. Where is the rest of the 35 gb?

Because that is the difference between windows and how manufactures considers what a gigabyte is. It's normal.

1GB according to the disk manufacturers is equal to 1,000,000,000 bytes. According to how the operating system (and the rest of the computing world) calculates it, it's equal to 1,024 megabytes, which in turn are equal to 1,024 kilobytes, which are themselves equal to 1,024 bytes. So one GB as per the disk manufacturer is really 1,000,000,000 / (1,024 x 1,024 x 1,024) = .931GB as measured by everybody else. So a "500GB" disk has 500 x .931GB of storage, or 465GB.

 

[beers]

^ That. Add another 1024 and 000 to the billion if you wanted to consider Terabyte drives too.

Another easy way is to just 1000/1024 for each denomination.

KB : 1000/1024 ~=0.9765
MB : 0.9765 * 0.9765 ~=0.9535
GB : 0.9535 * 0.9765 ~= 0.9311

500 GB * 0.9311 ~= 465 GiB

 

[ssal]

Thank you for the explanation. That makes sense.

While I was wondering what to do with a perfect fine 256 gb SSD (I have plenty of 500 and 1000 gb HHD's), I found that a used one on eBay could fetch $50+.

Hey, that would buy me a nice steak dinner.

Any suggestion to completely format/erase the drive so there is no way to retrieve my personal information?

 

[ssal]

An used 256gb SSD sold for $72

I completed erased and formatted the used drive and it was sold for $72, which lowered my marginal cost of upgrading to the 500 gb to $110.

Not bad, not bad at all.