< -- BuySellAds Ad Code ALLEN -->
  • Home
  • General
  • Why Does My Hard Drive Show Less Space Than It Has

Why Does My Hard Drive Show Less Space Than It Has

IT Problem

You have a new hard disk or a new external hard drive. When you format it up it shows as having a lot less space than what you have bought. For example a New 1TB hard disk when formatted with NTFS with only show 931GB

 

IT Solution

Hard drives internal and external are sold and marketed using decimal gigabytes.This means that  a “GB” consists of 1,000,000,000 bytes.

However, computers do now work out hard disk size in decimal they interpret gigabytes in binary. To a computer, 1 GB = 2^30 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes.

The ratio of “actual” to “usable” file size is the ratio of these two interpretations, or roughly 0.9313225.

This means that an X-sized (marketed by the seller of the hard disk) drive actually has 0.9313225*X of space usable to a computer.

 

For more information on what a megabyte is have a read of wikis information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabyte

Tags: hard drive space

Allen White

Allen is an IT Consultant and holds the following accreditations. MCSA, MCSE, MCTS, MCITP, CCA, CCSP, VCP 4,5, 6 and HP ASE, AIS - Network Infrastructure.

Leave a comment

Categories

Vote!

What Web Browser Do You Use?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Vote!

What do you prefer..VMware or Hyper-V?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...