Question about hard drive capacity

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Alciel

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Nov 9, 2013
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I just have a quick question about the total number of GB or TB advertised vs the actual amount available.

Why is it that a hard drive is advertised as lets say a 5Tb drive but in reality it comes up as 4.6Tb? That's 342.6Gb that's missing from the advertised drive, to me that seems like a lot.

Is there anyway I can reclaim that lost space? Or is there something that I'm understanding.
 
Solution
USAFRet
You have lost nothing. There is nothing to reclaim.
2 different methods of counting that drive space. Base 2 and Base 10.

This is absolutely normal and expected.
A "1TB" reports as 931GB.
A "2TB" drive reports as 1.81TB.
Extrapolate up and down as needed.

Gigabyte vs gibibyte. http://wintelguy.com/gb2gib.html

Again...you have lost nothing. Blame the marketing people.
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Alciel

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Nov 9, 2013
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Oh alright, I didn't know that.

Why do the marketing people like advertise like this? Wouldn't uninformed purchasers who aren't tech savvy think that they are getting the full advertised capacity?
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

Titan
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Mar 16, 2013
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Uninformed users do not know enough to find out where it might say 931GB instead of 1TB.

If you were out buying a drive, and one said 1TB and one said 931GB...same price...which would you buy?
 
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Ambular

Ambular

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Mar 25, 2016
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Also, the standard was set a long time ago, when storage capacities were measured in kilobytes or megabytes. 24k or 24mb here and there didn't add up to nearly as great a total difference back then. The larger the drive capacity, the bigger the seeming discrepancy becomes.
 
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