I recently got a new HDD on loan (for TechED to install Windows 64 bit). I get a bit irritated when the hard drive and the description shows 160GB when the actual size if 148GB. Is this now just acceptable way of doing things?
They have been doing that for years, its only now that the HDD being getting bigger have more and more people been noticing.
It's in the fine print. You will find that hard drive manufacturers will state something like the following on their product data sheets:
"One gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes and one terabyte, or TB, equals one trillion bytes when referring to hard drive capacity"
This has been the standard for many years...
That is why we nowadays have GiB/MiB which after all makes perfect sence since 1000 == kilo since ages.
en.wikipedia.org/.../Mebibyte
Drivemakers Kilobyte - 'shrinks by 4 bytes each year for marketing reasons'
http://xkcd.com/394/