How many bits are on available on a 256 SD card?

[torok]

I'm making some movies and I figured that having them fit snuggly on a 256 card would be a good size to shoot for. Do I have the entire capacity of the card available to me, though? Can I make the file 255 megs, or even 256? And which "megabyte" is it? The one that 1,000 bytes, or 1,024? This is so confusing.

I came up with 2147483648 bits in total. Is that right?

[Zack Mahdavi]

Not quite... 256MB is 2^28 bytes, which is 268,535,456 bytes. A megabyte is 2^20, or 1,058,576 bytes. Also, you have to remember that the device has to store file tables...

My 256MB card has a capacity of 230MB, according to the Pocket PC. So aim for a movie size around 229MB, and you should be fine.

[torok]

Great! Thank you. :D

[Zack Mahdavi]

My 256MB card has a capacity of 230MB, according to the Pocket PC. So aim for a movie size around 229MB, and you should be fine.

Oops, sorry about that... I guess I'm having problems reading today.. The Pocket PC registers the total size of the card as 242.03MB, not 230MB.

[kosmicki]

Pretty much all memory companies use 1,000 instead of 1,024.

To me, its very decepetive and cheats the consumer.

[Kowalski]

Pretty much all memory companies use 1,000 instead of 1,024.
To me, its very decepetive and cheats the consumer.
this is not honesty! the companies lie! they only get 0,1 % by saying this but they do anyway

the exect capacity also depends on the format of the card too.
i formated mine fat32. and i have a total of 240.24 megs

[Janak Parekh]

To me, its very decepetive and cheats the consumer.
Agreed, and we've debated this before, but short of passing laws about it, I don't see it being fixed. :|

--janak