{"id":918,"date":"2010-06-02T22:26:18","date_gmt":"2010-06-02T12:26:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/?p=918"},"modified":"2010-06-02T22:26:18","modified_gmt":"2010-06-02T12:26:18","slug":"hard-drive-capacities-know-what-you-are-getting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/hard-drive-capacities-know-what-you-are-getting\/","title":{"rendered":"Hard Drive Capacities &#8211; Know What You Are Getting!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over the years, you may have wondered whether or not you have been duped when you bought a new computer with a hard drive of a higher capacity that your current computer or maybe when you just buy a new drive to put into your existing computer. The shop of manufacturer may advertising one capacity but Windows may report something different.<\/p>\n<p>It can be a bit puzzling but there is an explanation.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_919\" style=\"width: 643px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/Windows-7-Disk-Management.png\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-919\" class=\"size-full wp-image-919 \" title=\"Windows 7 - Disk Management\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/Windows-7-Disk-Management.png?resize=643%2C447\" alt=\"Windows 7 - Disk Management\" width=\"643\" height=\"447\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/Windows-7-Disk-Management.png?w=918&amp;ssl=1 918w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/Windows-7-Disk-Management.png?resize=300%2C208&amp;ssl=1 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 643px) 100vw, 643px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-919\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Windows 7 - Disk Management<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The above is a screenshot of the disk management console on my computer. I have two fixed drives in my computer, specifically:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Disk 0\n<ul>\n<li>128GB SSD<\/li>\n<li>Windows reports 119.42GB<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Disk 1\n<ul>\n<li>1TB HDD<\/li>\n<li>Windows reports 931.51GB<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So why is there a difference? Where did my 68GB go?<\/p>\n<p>It comes down to simple mathematics. Originally, operating systems used &#8220;base 2&#8221; as the measurement unit for storage whilst disk capacities have always used &#8220;base 10&#8221;. In real terms, under &#8220;base 2&#8221; measurement, Windows allocated:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>1024 bytes to 1 kilobyte,<\/li>\n<li>1024 kilobytes to 1 megabyte,<\/li>\n<li>1024 megabytes to 1 gigabyte,<\/li>\n<li>1024 gigabytes to 1 terabyte<\/li>\n<li>etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This contrasts against &#8220;base 10&#8221; measurements of:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>1000 bytes to 1 kilobyte,<\/li>\n<li>1000 kilobytes to 1 megabyte,<\/li>\n<li>1000 megabytes to 1 gigabyte,<\/li>\n<li>1000 gigabytes to 1 terabyte,<\/li>\n<li>etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So under &#8220;base 2&#8221;, 1 terabyte is comprised of 1,099,511,627,776 bytes 1024^4 bytes) versus 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (10^12 bytes) under &#8220;base 10&#8221;. Seemingly, that is a difference of over 99GB of space on the scale of a 1TB &#8220;base 2&#8221; hard drive versus a 1TB &#8220;base 10&#8221; hard drive.<\/p>\n<p>So how does Windows get 931.51GB from 1TB?<\/p>\n<p>Quite simply, to convert 1TB from &#8220;base 10&#8221; to &#8220;base 2&#8221; in terms of bytes, we need to divide by 1,073,741,824 (1024^3 bytes, representing 1GB in bytes in &#8220;base 2&#8221;) which yields the result of 931GB.<\/p>\n<p>So the good news is that you aren&#8217;t getting less than what you are paid for, just that Windows is stuck in old school mode reporting the capacity of your hard drive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the years, you may have wondered whether or not you have been duped when you bought a new computer with a hard drive of a higher capacity that your current computer or maybe when you just buy a new drive to put into your existing computer. The shop of manufacturer may advertising one capacity &hellip; <\/p>\n<p><a class=\"more-link btn\" href=\"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/hard-drive-capacities-know-what-you-are-getting\/\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[93,152,151,92,18],"tags":[582,585,2261,583,584,2275,442,586,157],"class_list":["post-918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hard-drive","category-microsoft-operating-systems-technology","category-operating-systems","category-storage","category-technology","tag-bytes","tag-gigabytes","tag-hard-drive","tag-kilobytes","tag-megabytes","tag-operating-systems","tag-solid-state-drive","tag-terabytes","tag-windows","item-wrap"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}