Seagate Barracuda 2TB drive showing "1.81 TB free of 1.81 TB"

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hbenthow

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Dec 11, 2014
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I just added a secondary SATA drive to my computer. It is a Seagate Barracuda 2TB drive, and when viewed in "This Computer", it says "1.81 TB free of 1.81 TB". Windows Disk Management describes it as "1863.01 GB".

Is this just a case of the deceptive hard drive labeling practices I've heard about, or did I format the disk incorrectly?

 
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C
Officially 1000 bytes became a kilobyte and 1024 bytes are a kibibyte. Computers use the kibibyte, mebibyte etc. way of denoting storage space. So when a hard drive turns up that has what the manufacturers and the marketeers all claim is 2TB, the computer takes one look at it and says, OK, so there are 2,000,000,000,000 bytes here. It then divides this amount by 1024 4 times to work out the number of tebibytes which in this case is approximately 1.81.

The difference between a kilobyte and a kibibyte is about 2.35%. It's not very much. The difference between a megabyte and a mebibyte is still less than 5%. But by the time we get up to the difference between a terabyte and a tebibyte the difference is nearly 10%.
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MWP0004

MWP0004

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Oct 26, 2016
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There are really two definitions of a gigabyte. A gigabyte is really equal to 1024 megabytes; however, for simplicity sake, sometimes people use 1 gigabyte = 1000 megabytes.

A lot of hard drive and computer manufacturers use the later equation because it allows them to market a drive as being 2 terabytes even though it is really 1.81.
 
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Calvin7

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Feb 19, 2013
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Officially 1000 bytes became a kilobyte and 1024 bytes are a kibibyte. Computers use the kibibyte, mebibyte etc. way of denoting storage space. So when a hard drive turns up that has what the manufacturers and the marketeers all claim is 2TB, the computer takes one look at it and says, OK, so there are 2,000,000,000,000 bytes here. It then divides this amount by 1024 4 times to work out the number of tebibytes which in this case is approximately 1.81.

The difference between a kilobyte and a kibibyte is about 2.35%. It's not very much. The difference between a megabyte and a mebibyte is still less than 5%. But by the time we get up to the difference between a terabyte and a tebibyte the difference is nearly 10%.
 
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