[SRR500]

My phone came with a 2 gig memory card. It always showed 1.8 gigs available after a format. I wasn't surprised, I figured .2 gigs was used by the file system leaving the rest for storage.

I just got a 16 gig card and put it in and formatted it and found that there was 14.7 gigs available.

Why does it take 1.3 gigs off the top on the bigger card?

Is it just reserving more space for a larger FAT (or whatever it uses)?

What file system does BlackBerry use?

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[Pete6]

14.7Gb remaining is right after BlackBerry has taken its bit of space for temporary files, caches and whatnot. This is what I got when I initially put my 16Gb card in. The bigger the card the more the OS takes.

The files system is FAT32 compatible.

[SRR500]

Thanks. That is what I was assuming. Just wanted top confirm my suspicions.

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[Matrix Leader]

Another reason is, the Space of 16 GB is calculated with a consideration that every 1000 kb make up 1 MB.

That is just a marketing thing in order to not confuse people

In reality though, every 1024 kb makes 1 MB

So if you do the maths, 16 GB = 16000 MB (according to the seller) is actually 16000 mb divided by 1024 kb, which equates to 15.625 GB, plus some files taken up by the formatting process, this gives you the real GB space on your memory card.

This concept is applied everywhere, in memory cards, on PC hard drives, etc.

Hope that gives you a better understanding

Regards,

Matrix Leader

[JRZLocal]

Yeah its standard nothing to worry about, your card is fine.

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[branflakes]

What Matrix said. I wish storage manufacturers would use the true size definitions that make up a megabyte and so forth. Very misleading.

[Matrix Leader]

What Matrix said. I wish storage manufacturers would use the true size definitions that make up a megabyte and so forth. Very misleading.

Very sad but true

I understand if this was in the old days, but at this age, with this still going on...I think this is very very misleading especially when you talk about huge HDDs like 1 TB and so...

[SRR500]

I never even considered that the manufacturers were rounding off the actual size of the card.

It actually makes sense to me for them to do that. The vast majority of people don't know or care to know details like that. They just want to buy based on a simple number. Pop it in their phone and be on their way.

It can be taken too far however. The 4g speed thing comes to mind. Kind of a grey area if you ask me.

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[Pete6]

What Matrix said. I wish storage manufacturers would use the true size definitions that make up a megabyte and so forth. Very misleading.

What ML said was quite correct but the confusion arises from the different ways that capacity is counted.

A manufacturer will count individual bytes in base 10 notataion i.e.1, 2, 3,4 ,5, 6, 7 8, 9, 10 and so on. This is a perfectly normal way to count. I do it all the time on my fingers - duh.

A manufacturer will count a kilobyte as 1'000 and a megabyte as 1'000'000. Perfectly logical if you are making bytes and counting them individually.

Computers (BlcakBerrys included) count 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024. Here lies the problem as ML pointed out.

If a manufactuere puts out a 16'000'000'000 byte (16Gb) microSDHD card and this is put into a BlackBerry you will see only 15'625'00'000 bytes.

This is not the whole story of the missing capacity however. To see the full story, you really need to connect the BlackBerry to your PC and enable Mass Storage Mode. Once you can see the BlackBerry disk in Computer, you will need to make a small change so as to view all the Hidden and System folders on the disk. Click Organize and then Folder and Search Options, Now select View on the resulant panel. Select Show Hidden Files and Folders and then uncheck Hide protected operating system files (Reccomended).

A number of hitherto hidden folders will now apear and this is where your missing capacity lies.

Please reverse the files and folder settings since you really don;lt want all the Windows System folders cluttering up your Explorer views.