Question about hard drive capacity

[Alciel]

I just have a quick question about the total number of GB or TB advertised vs the actual amount available.

Why is it that a hard drive is advertised as lets say a 5Tb drive but in reality it comes up as 4.6Tb? That's 342.6Gb that's missing from the advertised drive, to me that seems like a lot.

Is there anyway I can reclaim that lost space? Or is there something that I'm understanding.

 

[USAFRet]

You have lost nothing. There is nothing to reclaim.
2 different methods of counting that drive space. Base 2 and Base 10.

This is absolutely normal and expected.
A "1TB" reports as 931GB.
A "2TB" drive reports as 1.81TB.
Extrapolate up and down as needed.

Gigabyte vs gibibyte. http://wintelguy.com/gb2gib.html

Again...you have lost nothing. Blame the marketing people.

 

[Alciel]

Oh alright, I didn't know that.

Why do the marketing people like advertise like this? Wouldn't uninformed purchasers who aren't tech savvy think that they are getting the full advertised capacity?

 

[USAFRet]

Oh alright, I didn't know that.

Why do the marketing people like advertise like this? Wouldn't uninformed purchasers who aren't tech savvy think that they are getting the full advertised capacity?

Uninformed users do not know enough to find out where it might say 931GB instead of 1TB.

If you were out buying a drive, and one said 1TB and one said 931GB...same price...which would you buy?

 

[Alciel]

Hmm, Good point.

 

[Ambular]

Also, the standard was set a long time ago, when storage capacities were measured in kilobytes or megabytes. 24k or 24mb here and there didn't add up to nearly as great a total difference back then. The larger the drive capacity, the bigger the seeming discrepancy becomes.