SxS 16gb CARD only 80% capacity why?

[Don Greening]

Probably because the formatted capacity of any storage device, whether it be solid state memory cards or computer hard drives will always be less than the advertised unformatted capacity.

– Don

[Craig Seeman]

Yes, seems to be about 14.9GB on 16GB cards.

[Dean Sensui]

Drive capacity is marketed by taking the number of available bytes and dividing by one billion to get “gigabytes”.

However, technically there are more than 1.073 billion bytes in a gigabyte. About 7 percent fewer gigabytes.

Would be nice if storage media manufacturers would be a bit more honest and use the actual definition of gigabyte in their specs.

Part of the drive is reserved for the operating system and is unavailable for data storage.

Finally, hard drives are broken up into “sectors” consisting of a fixed number of bytes. A video clip will span a lot of sectors but often leaves one last sector only partially full. The next clip can’t use the “leftover” bytes in that sector and can only start on a new unused sector. So there’s always unavailable capacity on any storage medium.

These three things probably add up to your 15 to 20 percent difference in rated vs actual capacity.

Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing

[Claudio Sandalo]

I think it depends of what are the pictures recorded, I normally see 80% used and total time of recording was 62-63 minutes(with many hundred of clips recorded), but when I recorded static scenes with not many clips, the total time of recording was max. 78 minutes and less space available.

[Dean Sensui]

[Claudio Sandalo] “I think it depends of what are the pictures recorded, I normally see 80% used and total time of recording was 62-63 minutes(with many hundred of clips recorded), but when I recorded static scenes with not many clips, the total time of recording was max. 78 minutes and less space available.”

That’s a good example of how a lot of shorter clips can leave a lot of partially-filled sectors. Whereas a few long clips will fill entire sectors and won’t waste as much of the card (or hard drive) capacity.

Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing