SanDisk memory card size reduced :(

I just recieved my genuine SanDisk Extreme III 1gb CF.
After wacking it into my 350d, formatted it, I now have 964mb free, WTF!
My fake eBay SanDisk Ultra II gives 988mb free, yes thats over 20mb more with a fake product.

I understand PC drives and memory card requires some MB to store some data but what does the genuine SanDisk use up 36mb to store?

Yeah formatting is a complicated business and there's alot that goes along with it. It'll never be exactly 1000MB. Perhaps somebody else will care to explain it more detail..

Exact capacities of memory cards do change a little from design to design. I suspect that Sandisk has opted for greater robustness at the cost of a small amount of capacity. The "missing" capacity may well be used for things like spare space to be substituted in the event of some cells wearing out - I'd trust a Sandisk card to get wear levelling and defect management right far more than a cheap no-name card.

David

My 2GB Ultra IIs are actually 1.8GB when in camera and formatted. No biggy. Memory is cheap enough not to niggle over a few MB. I have more important things to worry about.

mine was 1.9 brand new

My suggestion is to wait a month and you can buy that card for almost half the price you paid for it. Check out the engadget article about 32 and 64 GB cards on the way from Samsung.

I imagine, that speed of cards will be more and more the differentiating factor because a 1GB card will be $10 very very soon.

canoflan wrote:
My suggestion is to wait a month and you can buy that card for almost half the price you paid for it.

If I lived by that philosophy, I still wouldn't have any memory cards.

I believe Compact Flash memory by design will ignore corrupt sectors, so over time and wear total memory size can fall.

canoflan wrote:
My suggestion is to wait a month and you can buy that card for almost half the price you paid for it. Check out the engadget article about 32 and 64 GB cards on the way from Samsung.

I imagine, that speed of cards will be more and more the differentiating factor because a 1GB card will be $10 very very soon.

funny you say that, i bought a 512mb brand new Sandisk this past weekend for $10. i only payed 60 for my ultra II 2 GB

1 gb is actually 1024mb so...its a little more taken up than you thought
anyway its the same deal with most memory give or take a few mb so it's no biggie

onionpants wrote:
1 gb is actually 1024mb so...its a little more taken up than you thought
anyway its the same deal with most memory give or take a few mb so it's no biggie

This is true, but you have to also realize that the memory card manufaturers define a GB and a MB differently than it really is. This quote is directly from Sandisk's Main page:

"Definitions of a Megabyte:
1) Operating Systems commonly define a Megabyte (MB) as: 2 to the 20th power (1,024KB--
Kilobytes).
2) DiskDrive and Flash Memory Card Manufacturers commonly define a MB as one million bytes
(exactly 1,000,000 bytes)."

Both of mine are just under by a few MBs as well... But so is everything... Take a look at your actual RAM in your computer and the actual size of your hard drive... It should be just under whatever size it says it is.

Yeah don't expect the card to have exactly 1 gig, or even over, it's always going to be under. Just be happy with the Extreme III, it's an awesome card, I've got a 1 gig and a 2 gig, it's so fast copying files to my computer with the sandisk USB 2.0 reader .

You're correct about the actual size of hard drives, as the storage manufacturers all seem to use 1 MB = 1,000,000 B for their sizing, but this isn't the case for memory. Hence the common memory sizes: 256 MB, 512 MB, 1024 MB, etc.

Yes I realize the different memory sizes.... but they are never the true 256, 512, 1024 etc etc.... it is always just under.