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Why is my hard drive smaller as advertised? |
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The capacity of hard drives is pronounced in bytes, like water is pronounced in liters. One liter is 1000 centiliter, while 1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes. A megabyte is then again 1024 kilobyte, and a gigabyte is 1024 megabyte.
Why 1024? 1024 is the cube from two, which is the method that computers are using.
Hard drive manufactures though, calculate with amounts of 1000. So with their calculations, one megabyte is 1000 kilobyte, and one gigabyte is 1000 megabyte. But Windows calculates with 1024 again.
So, when a hard drive manufacturer claims a drive has 1 gigabyte, Windows only sees 977 MB. The calculation goes like this: ((n *1000)/1024)*1000=y where n stands for the mount of gigabytes and y is the total amount of megabytes.
In example a drive of 250 gigabyte: ((250 * 1000)/1024) = 244140 MB (megabyte), which would be in theory actually 244 gigabyte. |
