Folks with Z11 and 256GB SSD (US version) what is the actual capacity size you're seeing?

For some reason i have 238.48Gb (in disk manager) after clean install and no system partitions.
when you advertise 256gb shouldn't it be 256gb?

 

As shurcooL pointed out in the Sony Vaio Z owners thread;

 

This goes for all consumer hard drives.
An enterprise 72 GB drive has the same capacity as a consumer 80 GB drive.

Up until mid-90s, all drives were sold with power-of-two notation. Then a single manufacturer started using power-of-ten notation instead, and consumers (ptui!) bought them thinking they were bigger. So the rest of the manufacturers followed suit.

 

There's always an item in the footnotes regarding this.

For example, this is from the marketing specs for VPCZ1190X:

 

Technically both are correct. 1G, without qualification, is considered to be 10^9. 1Gi is 2^30
1G = 1,000,000,000
1Gi = 1,073,741,824

When talking about RAM only GiB makes sense to even discuss (because RAM addressing is 2^n based) and so no one ever seems to confuse that one. (example: 64K of memory is 65,536 bytes)

When discussing hard drives, it could be argued that 2^n makes no more sense than 10^n. The number of sectors tracks etc are not really 2^n based.

So one could argue that 10^n tells you how many bytes you have using the normal counting technique that we all grew up with (i.e. 256GB means you have about 256 thousand million bytes available to store data in).

The counter argument is that if one is to make an apples to apples comparison to RAM then it makes more sense to use 2^n (i.e. 256GB hard drive stores the equivalent of 238.4GiB of RAM)

So what it seems we have ended up with, at this point, is that Windows, Linux et al report it both ways. Manufacturers tend to report both but, as Arith points out, the larger number is the one that make it to the front of the box whereas the smaller number gets relegated to the footnote