Why hard drive appear a different size than whats on the label

[sgj320]

My HDD is 160gb but when you view it in My computer it's only 149.05gb ?

 

[DiscoDuck]

after formatting.....its smaller........sigh. Hard drives makers consider 1gb as 1000mb althought the computer sees 1gb as 1024mb. So, a 1tb drive will have 1000 gb of storage, and will show as 976gb in the computer. Its a little deceptive on the hdd makers part.

 

[sminlal]

Is that the "total capacity" or the "free space"?

Total capacity is often seen to be "smaller" because a "GB" can be measured two ways: as 1,000,000,000 bytes or 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes. The drive manufacturers often quote the number that makes the drive look biggest.

Formatted capacity is smaller than total capacity because some of the space is used for indexes, directories, and other file system metadata.

 

[megamanx00]

^pretty much as sminlal and DiscoDuck said

There can also be a few megs left unformated (like 9megs) depending on the file system.