Hard Drive
- Thread starter Ingolf
- Start date
Heres an explanation to your question, use it to do the math to see if windows is allocating the correct amount of space on your HDD:
By tradition, hard drive manufacturers and resellers specify storage capacity in decimal (base 10) form. In contrast, Windows and other operating systems use binary (base 2) notation. This is why, for example, that a HDD labeled and sold by the manufacturer as 76.86 GB is reported by Windows as 71.6 GB.
NOTE: Always convert like units to like units, e.g., decimal GB to binary GB, or binary GB to decimal GB.
To convert decimal kilobytes to binary kilobytes multiply by .976563
1000 / 1024 = 10^3 / 2^10 ~ .976563
To convert decimal megabytes to binary megabytes multiply by .953674
1000^2 / 1024^2 = 10^6 / 2^20 ~ .953674
To convert decimal gigabytes to binary gigabytes multiply by .931323
1000^3 / 1024^3 = 10^9 / 2^30 ~ .931323
To convert decimal terabytes to binary terabytes multiply by .909495
1000^4 / 1024^4 = 10^12 / 2^40 ~ .909495
To convert in the other direction, e.g., binary units to decimal units, multiply by the reciprocal (multiplicative inverse).
To convert binary kilobytes to decimal kilobytes multiply by 1.024
To convert binary megabytes to decimal megabytes multiply by 1.04858
To convert binary gigabytes to decimal gigabytes multiply by 1.07374
To convert binary terabytes to decimal terabytes multiply by 1.09951
By tradition, hard drive manufacturers and resellers specify storage capacity in decimal (base 10) form. In contrast, Windows and other operating systems use binary (base 2) notation. This is why, for example, that a HDD labeled and sold by the manufacturer as 76.86 GB is reported by Windows as 71.6 GB.
NOTE: Always convert like units to like units, e.g., decimal GB to binary GB, or binary GB to decimal GB.
To convert decimal kilobytes to binary kilobytes multiply by .976563
1000 / 1024 = 10^3 / 2^10 ~ .976563
To convert decimal megabytes to binary megabytes multiply by .953674
1000^2 / 1024^2 = 10^6 / 2^20 ~ .953674
To convert decimal gigabytes to binary gigabytes multiply by .931323
1000^3 / 1024^3 = 10^9 / 2^30 ~ .931323
To convert decimal terabytes to binary terabytes multiply by .909495
1000^4 / 1024^4 = 10^12 / 2^40 ~ .909495
To convert in the other direction, e.g., binary units to decimal units, multiply by the reciprocal (multiplicative inverse).
To convert binary kilobytes to decimal kilobytes multiply by 1.024
To convert binary megabytes to decimal megabytes multiply by 1.04858
To convert binary gigabytes to decimal gigabytes multiply by 1.07374
To convert binary terabytes to decimal terabytes multiply by 1.09951
here is a short explination of this
when you buy a new hard drive there is nothing on it, think of this as say, an empty room, just 4 walls and a door to get in. the hard drive has to be formatted (creating a file system), which would be like putting shelves in your empty room. The shelves in your empty room take up some space in the room, the same way with the file system on a hard drive, the "shelves" for the data take up some of the room on the hard drive, so thats why it's reading only 195 gb or whatever, because of the file system taking up room on the drive
like on my primary hard drive, I have a partition for my os and progs, which is 50 gb, it only shows at 48.8 gb, and I have the rest as another partition which is 150 gb, but it shows as 141 gb. and my 250gb drive is showing at 233gb, which leads me to believe that the bigger the drive the more space you lose. you can't have your cake and eat it too, windows doesn't work like that.....lol
when you buy a new hard drive there is nothing on it, think of this as say, an empty room, just 4 walls and a door to get in. the hard drive has to be formatted (creating a file system), which would be like putting shelves in your empty room. The shelves in your empty room take up some space in the room, the same way with the file system on a hard drive, the "shelves" for the data take up some of the room on the hard drive, so thats why it's reading only 195 gb or whatever, because of the file system taking up room on the drive
like on my primary hard drive, I have a partition for my os and progs, which is 50 gb, it only shows at 48.8 gb, and I have the rest as another partition which is 150 gb, but it shows as 141 gb. and my 250gb drive is showing at 233gb, which leads me to believe that the bigger the drive the more space you lose. you can't have your cake and eat it too, windows doesn't work like that.....lol
