hi all I bought a sandisk 16 gig from argos today and its a micro sdhc card and I bought this for my Samsung s3 but I have put it in my phone and is only showing 14.8 gig does anyone know why this is happening and not showing 16.gig I have also tried it on my laptop and its still showing the same should I take it back too argos or is this normal thanks

If it's anything like a hard drive, which I'm 95% sure it is, then it's all the in the way they define a gigabyte...

It's not right in terms of how a computer will define it, but manufacturers define 1 GB as 1000000000 bytes instead of 1073741824 bytes.

So 16GB to them means 14.8 ish GB in reality.

Happens with all pen drives and hard drives, etc. Take a look next time if you weren't aware of it, but hard drives are always much smaller than they logically should be.

So I guess 32GB would actually show up around the 29GB mark.
According to some manufacturers 16 Giga bytes is 16 Billion bytes (10^6), but in computer terms a Kilo Byte is 1024 Bytes , not 1000 Bytes, similarly a Mega Byte is 1024 KiloBytes and a Gigabyte is 1024 MegaBytes.

To convert 16Billion bytes : 16 x 1000^3 to actual Gigabytes, you have to divide by 1024 ^3, then you get 14.9GBs.

The FAT (File allocation table) also takes up some space around 4 bytes per every 4KB block if I'm not mistaken. Given everything you should see something slightly less than 14.9 GBs. On mine it reads 14.83GB, which sounds right.

I have just copied this i was reading up on it a while back when i was looking for the same reason as you. It just tells me the card was ok. Didn't understand any of it tbh.

As above.
There trying to have descriptions changed to be more human than technical.

Its the same for everyone, the larger the storage the more you seem to loose. But its the same for everyone so your not loosing out, just like everyone else miffed at it seemingly going into fresh air.

ok thanks for your help its bit like my phone it says its a 16 gig phone but its os takes some off the gig up so u really don't get a 16 gig phone so thanks for all your help peeps