Why does the hard drive never receive “enough” space? Here is the answer for you

Have you ever wondered why HDDs and SSDs, when tested, almost never accept enough capacity? If so, I will explain it right away.

Imagine this: for example, one fine day you go to buy a Seagate Barracuda HDD to save study materials. Obviously you choose the version up to 1 TB, but when you go home to review it on Windows, it is only about 931 GB, so you are angry because you believe the wrong company.

But don’t jump to conclusions, because the truth is that other companies’ hard drives also have the same case.

Bought a 1TB drive, but in Windows only about 931GB…

The reason is because the computer it does not calculate in decimal with numbers like 10, 100, 1000 … like us, but it calculates in binary, guys. With binary, 1 GB will be worth 1024 MB (ie 2^10); similarly, 1 MB equals 1024 KB and 1 KB equals 1024 bytes.

…that’s because computers “understand” in a different sense than we do.

Your 1 TB hard drive has a total capacity of 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. According to the calculation of the average person with the decimal system, it is true that you will have 1000 GB, but according to the computer’s binary system, you will only have about 931 GB. 1000 GB of decimal and 931 GB of binary are equivalent and your storage capacity is unchanged. Only the way of writing is different.

An interesting thing is that if you use Apple’s macOS, you will find that in this operating system, its calculation will be more “friendly” to users. For example, if you plug the SSD into the machine running MacOS, it will display enough 1000GB for you.

So essentially the storage value of the hard drive remains unchanged. It’s just because the understanding is not consistent…

In general, depending on the calculation method of the operating system, the computer will display differently, and whether the capacity of the hard drive is displayed in decimal or binary, its value will not change.

No one cheats your hard drive, nor does the computer not receive enough space, it simply calculates capacity in a different way from the way we “humans”.

According to gearvn