Why is Hard Drive Capacity Different from Advertised Sizes ?
There must have been times when you bought a hard drive or a memory card and realized that the hard drive capacity shown on the package is more than the available space. Ever wondered why the available space was lesser ?
Well, the capacity of the hard drive is the same as what is advertised on the package. The discrepancy in the available space and the advertised space is due to the way the capacity of a hard drive is calculated.
There are methods used to calculate how much information can be stored on the hard disk drive. They are base-2 system and the base-10 system.
In the base-2 system used by the OS, 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes. While the base-10 system used by the manufacturing company, 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes.
The table below shows the difference for some commonly used drive capacities.
|
Base 10 |
Base 2 |
| 80 GB | 76.3 GB |
| 120 GB | 114.4 GB |
| 160 GB | 152.6 GB |
| 250 GB | 238.4 GB |
| 1000 GB | 953.7 GB |
Hope this explained why there is a difference between the available and advertised spaces. May you brain rest in peace knowing you weren’t cheated
Related posts:
View other post by Alfred
Discover and Share
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader. If you don't have a feed reader, you can always have these articles delivered to your email inbox every day. Click here to sign up.
Trackbacks & Pingbacks
Comments
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Thank you for clearing that out for me. You’re right, there have been many times that I bought a hard drive that does not have the capacity as advertised. Cheers.
Hmm…I never knew this. I feel ripped off
Yeah, the gap is more remarkable on higher capacity hard drives. This is when you feel ripped off. Great info dude.
Perhaps you would like to read this
1 Gigabyte is Not Equal to 1024 Megabytes