Where did my memory go?

You never acutally loose anything when you format any drive or memory device. It's all a matter of how the acutal space is converted to Kilobyes, Megabyes, and Gigabyes.

Lets take the following image for example of a 1gb memory stick for a PSP.

Its acutal capacity is 995,819,520 bytes. Now, You may look at that and see 995MB, which is correct if you're dividing by 1,000,000. But Windows seems to be reporting 949 MB... Where did the 46MB go?

Nowhere... lets divide like a computer...
995,819,520 b / 1024 = 972,480 KB
972,480 KB / 1024 = 949 MB

Nothing lost, just converted differently. Try this trick on any sized drive for any device, and you'll find that no memory is in fact lost, Windows just converts the numbers by dividing by 1024, while we divide by 1000.

Why computers divide by 1024 you ask? Well, in short, computers deal with data in binary (1's and 0's). Eight binary digits make a byte. 1024 divides evenly by 8.

You can run the same math on this example (a much larger drive, with a different file system):