False HDD advertising?

Ok, so i got my 360 yesterday and i love it, perhaps the best console ive ever owned, but I'm slightly confused.

The HDD is supposed to be 20gb right? well i checked on the 360 and it said total space:13.9gb, isnt that false advertisement?

Is every HDD like this or is there something wrong with mine?

Also at the moment im using a one month gold free trial, but for some reason i cant use my headset, it cant be broken already! Can you not use headsets in the free trial or something?

About the headset since I don't want to comment on the HDD, you have to change an option that allows voice communication. I think its under edit gamer profile or in the last blade.II-FBIsniper-II

Thanks, but may i ask why you dont want to comment?

The HDD is 20GB, only about 14GB is useable space. The rest is reserved for updates and backwards compatibility. It is not false advertising b/c they never said 20GB of usuable space, they just said 20gb, which it isrbrown3

Fair enough, just curious is all.

[QUOTE="rbrown3"]The HDD is 20GB, only about 14GB is useable space. The rest is reserved for updates and backwards compatibility. It is not false advertising b/c they never said 20GB of usuable space, they just said 20gb, which it isSnake4eva_92

Fair enough, just curious is all.

I work in a Senator's office, and we have actually had people write letters in accusing Microsoft of false advertising regarding the HDD space. I'd say in the few months I have worked there, I've seen 7 or 8 letters about this. So we made some calls from the office and that's the explanation we were told to give people. Hope that helpsrbrown3

Yeah it helped, thanks, i wanted to see if anyone knew though before i wrote hate mail to Microsoft, i do love their concolse really :P

This isn't anything new, you will never buy a harddrive that has as much space as it says (i.e. if you go out and buy a 250gig harddrive you will not have 250gigs of storage). Roland1987

Microsoft does what most companies do when they say hard drive space: When they say 20GB, they literally mean 20,000,000,000 bytes.  You need to divide that to convert it to real GB...so 20,000,000,000 / 1024(MB) / 1024(KB) / 1024(Bytes) which equals roughly 18.6 GB. 

 So the drive only has about 18.6 space on it to start.  Then there is 1GB taken for installed operating system and other files.  And around 4GB for swap space.  That leaves 13.6GB that YOU can actually use.

Ok, so i got my 360 yesterday and i love it, perhaps the best console ive ever owned, but I'm slightly confused.

The HDD is supposed to be 20gb right? well i checked on the 360 and it said total space:13.9gb, isnt that false advertisement?

Is every HDD like this or is there something wrong with mine?

Also at the moment im using a one month gold free trial, but for some reason i cant use my headset, it cant be broken already! Can you not use headsets in the free trial or something?

Snake4eva_92

Every HDD does that, even for computers.  There is always some space that is being used on it when you get it, but it is indeed 20 GB.

About the headset since I don't want to comment on the HDD, you have to change an option that allows voice communication. I think its under edit gamer profile or in the last blade.II-FBIsniper-II

Yeh i know i had some problems when i got my xbox in not being able to play original xbox games on xbox live and it was because i needed to change some family settings to allow me to i am not positive but i think there is something to do with mics there as well