That's the oddity Bluce. On SSDs it is reported. For example if you buy a 128GB SSD when you install it note that you don't have 128GB of available memory (IIRC most SSDs hold back about 10% of the drive depending on size for things like leveling, TRIM and caching). I know on mechanical HDDs you're correct - makes one wonder why they don't follow the same convention on SSDs - maybe it has to do with the memory size multiple on MMC chips (a 128 GB SSD is typically 8 16GB chips) and the marketing goofs think saying a SSD is a 112GB SSD sounds "uncool"?
--- merged: Jan 30, 2013 at 11:39 PM ---
Waze is indeed nice. My phone gets Nokia Drive and Maps free. That is nice as Nokia is considered a "best of breed" in the GPS arena (along with Garmins stuff). And unlike many others it works 100% offline if you want.
Mechanical HDDs are the worst offenders. They never deliver the advertised storage capacity, in my experience. This was true even on enterprise SAS drives I installed not too long ago.
SSDs, on the other hand, were almost dead on, at least on the enterprise level. The advertised capacity didn't include the over provisioning, which is typically 20% on enterprise class SSD. The only ones I got my hands on with no over provisioning were a set of Intel 520s, advertised as 480 GB and I got nearly all 480 off each drive.
Enterprise class stuff that's come though my hands was usually provisioned this way:
100 GB advertised (128 GB)
400 GB advertised (480 GB)
The lack of over provisioning doesn't lend itself well to the drive's lifespan. This isn't true with SLC SSDs, though, as the cells have much longer life spans (consumer MLC @ 3k to 5k write cycles vs enterprise MLC @ up to 30k cycles and SLC that can easily go over 100k cycles). A single cycle represents full writing to the entire drive space, so writing 400 GB to a 400 GB drive is one full cycle.
