SD Card Capacity not Full

[andysoon]

Just bought Sandisk 512MB & install to my e750 but the capacity only shows 485MB. Aren't they should be 512MB ???

[Darius Wey]

Usually, no. You'll only get 512MB when unformatted. Formatting the card (usually FAT) takes up some space. It's much like how you don't get the full 120GB on a 120GB HDD and so on.

[andysoon]

Thanks Darius.
:wink:

[ADBrown]

Also, memory and hard drive manufacturers account for space differently than the operating system accounts for it. A memory card manufacturer considers a megabyte to be 1,000,000 bytes. The OS says 1 MB is 1,048,576 bytes (1 kilobyte being 1024 bytes, 1 megabyte being 1024 kilobytes. So a memory card that is 512,000,000 bytes is only 488.3 MB according to the OS, prior to formatting.

[Dyvim]

Kind of off-topic, but I own a 1 GB CF card by SanDisk and a 1 GB SD card also by SanDisk, both from their Ultra II line.

1 GB CF = ~977 MB
1 GB SD = ~967 MB

I would think they would be the same, but they're not... Weird.