I am trying to burn a project to a dual layer disk that is coming out to about 8.40GB... I have a stack of Verbatim 8.5GB dual layer disks, that for some reason are only showing a capacity of 8.125GB... I thought Verbatim short-changed me, and bought a 3-pack of HP dual layer disks... same thing... 8.5 disk is only showing a capacity of 8.125... is this a reserve of space that's automatic, or is this an issue with Nero, which is what we are using to burn disks??? Any help will be greatly appreciated, since we have slipped past our deadline for having this project ready to send off...
The numbering system used to describe capacity of discs has been a problem since they early days of computing. We use a Base-10 system and like to use round numbers but computers are based on Base 2 and Base-16, so you won't get the nice even numbers we expect. e.g. when you say "one kilobyte" do you really mean 1,000 bytes or 1,024? The former is a nice round number that we like in our Base-10 system, the former is a multiple of 2 and is the closest you can get to 1000 with whole numbers. With 1k, that 24 bytes is pretty trivial and most people don't care, but multiply that 1000 times (as in a megabyte) or 1000000 times (as in a gigabyte) and that difference becomes quite significant. Plus, discs may have some space set aside for administrative and book-keeping functions like file allocation tables. At the end of the day, this all means that the numbers are mostly meaningless to use for planning purposes unless you KNOW exactly how much data a given disc will hold. In the case of a DL DVD+R, I believe the capacity is 8,540,000,000 bytes.
