How do you maximize the CF card capacity when formatting

[Carl Gee]

Just bought a 512MB Sandisk Ultra, formatted it
in my Canon S1, but only got 488MB,
is this normal ?
Is there a way to maximize or get it close to 512MB ?

[adas]

You have to live with it.This is because 512MB is the unformatted capacity.When formatting a few MB is taken to build the file system structure.
Do you remember the old 1.44MB diskettes?In reality these were 2MB(unformatted).
The question you may ask now is why manufacturers don't put some extra MB on the card so after formatting we get a full 512MB capacity?
Because different camera have different formatting scheme and again we aren't sure we will get the whole 512MB.

[Jon]

Actually, it's worse than that. A megabyte to your computer is 2^20, or 1,048,576 bytes. A megabyte to the marketing types who defined the label for your card is a mere 1,000,000 bytes. So 512,000,000 (marketing) bytes is really 488 (computer) MB (do the math). Nobody's going to get 512 MB from a 512 MB CF. Essentially all cameras, PDAs, and other users of CF devices (or SD, for that matter) use FAT, either FAT16 or FAT32, so the overhead's pretty standard. Floppies were substantially smaller than their nominal size because they're an inherently unreliable medium and a fair amount of the theoretical capacity was tied up in error-correcting bits. That's not a problem with flash memory.

[pradeep1]

512,000,000 / 1,048,576 = 488.28 - filesystem ~ 487 MB usable. 8)