The endless debate over this issue is really becoming tedious. Especially when it really isn't an issue at all.
First off, I don't know who coined this "7% rule" nonsense, but it's misleading. While the difference in hard drive manufacturer-defined space (powers of 10) and OS manufacturer defined space (powers of 2) result in a (1000/1024)^3 = 6.86% difference in reported space, this is only valid when comparing Gigabytes. If you're comparing Megabytes, the difference is 4.64%, if comparing Terabytes, the difference jumps to 9.05%. This becomes misleading and difficult to generalize at best, and easy to be completely wrong by accidentally using the wrong prefix at worst.
Second, there is this perpetual myth out there that the "loss" in space is attributable to the formatting overhead.
It is not. First of all, formatting overhead for the NTFS file system is a few dozen
MB at most. Not a few dozen GB, a few dozen
MB. Here is a screenshot of a brand new 750GB drive formatted as NTFS:
A whopping 90MB has been used for the MBR, Boot Sector, and MFT. Piddly squat. Drop in the bucket.
0.012 % Conclusion: There is virtually no loss in usable space due to formatting.
Third,
there is no "loss" in space at all. Look at the numbers. Drive size: 750,153,720,000 bytes. Looks like 750 GB to me.
SO WHAT if Windows reports it as 698 GB? Does it matter? I have 750,063,259,648 bytes of space available. It doesn't matter if you call that 750GB, 698GB, or 3.14159265 Megacupcakes, they're all talking about the exact same amount of space. And it's exactly what the drive manufacturer claimed it to be. And it's exactly what you bought and paid for.
End of discussion.