8TB drive,only available 7.2TB

[frozensun]

Hey friends.

WD mybook came to me I connected it to USB port but I see only 7.2TB available and I lost 800GB which is a lot to me.

I suppose that is the way it should be,but why?

Disk is formatted with exfat.

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, frozensun said:

WD mybook came to me I connected it to USB port but I see only 7.2TB available and I lost 800GB which is a lot to me.

I suppose that is the way it should be,but why?

HDD- and SSD-manufacturers like to cheat with the numbers they report, ie. they calculate one terabyte as being 1000 gigabytes and one gigabyte as being 1000 megabytes and so on, whereas they should be counted as being multiples of 1024. Converting the claimed "8TB" to multiples of 1024, you do get about 7.3TiB, which is what Windows and everything else uses, so you are actually seeing the correct amount of space.

[frozensun]

1 minute ago, WereCatf said:

HDD- and SSD-manufacturers like to cheat with the numbers they report, ie. they calculate one terabyte as being 1000 gigabytes and one gigabyte as being 1000 megabytes and so on, whereas they should be counted as being multiples of 1024. Converting the claimed "8TB" to multiples of 1024, you do get about 7.3TiB, which is what Windows and everything else uses, so you are actually seeing the correct amount of space.

Damn..800GB of wasted space is a lot..

So bigger the disk,bigger the loss

[WereCatf]

Just now, frozensun said:

Damn..800GB of wasted space is a lot..

So bigger the disk,bigger the loss

Yeah, it sucks. Not much you can do about it, either, since there's no way of forcing these manufacturers to stop misleading people like this.

[aDoomGuy]

5 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

HDD- and SSD-manufacturers like to cheat with the numbers they report, ie. they calculate one terabyte as being 1000 gigabytes and one gigabyte as being 1000 megabytes and so on, whereas they should be counted as being multiples of 1024. Converting the claimed "8TB" to multiples of 1024, you do get about 7.3TiB, which is what Windows and everything else uses, so you are actually seeing the correct amount of space.

It is not that HDD/SSD manufacturers like to cheat. 

 

Kilo does in fact mean one thousand. It doesn't mean 1024. WINDOWS shows a Kilo as 1024 because Bill Gates in his infinite wisdom once figured this is how it should be. Maybe because he lives in his own universe... /shrug

 

A 1TB HDD/SSD does in fact have 1TB of storage, it is just operating systems that gives a different reading.

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, aDoomGuy said:

Kilo does in fact mean one thousand. It doesn't mean 1024. WINDOWS shows a Kilo as 1024 because Bill Gates in his infinite wisdom once figured this is how it should be. Maybe because he lives in his own universe... /shrug

I know what kilo means, but the context matters as well: in computing, kilobytes, megabytes etc. have always been multiples of 1024 already way before Windows ever existed. You going off the rails and blaming Bill for it is just ignorant and you're also ignoring the context. All modern OSes use multiples of 1024, most hardware-manufacturers use the same, but it's HDD-/SSD-manufacturers that like to go against the grain and use multiples of 1000 -- they are the ones deviating from established standards.

[aDoomGuy]

8 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

I know what kilo means, but the context matters as well: in computing, kilobytes, megabytes etc. have always been multiples of 1024 already way before Windows ever existed. You going off the rails and blaming Bill for it is just ignorant and you're also ignoring the context. All modern OSes use multiples of 1024, most hardware-manufacturers use the same, but it's HDD-/SSD-manufacturers that like to go against the grain and use multiples of 1000 -- they are the ones deviating from established standards.

Who made the operating system that preceded Windows? Was it not Bill Gates and his little Microsoft? You say you know what Kilo means, yet half a sentence later you forget. Kilo means one thousand. That is what the word means in Greek, so why should it be different when it comes to bytes or bits? I know all modern operating systems don't use the same standard as most of the rest of the world. It is not HDD manufacturers that deviate from established standards it is the makers of operating systems that are deviating from standards that have been established since the 18th century.

[WereCatf]

Just now, aDoomGuy said:

Who made the operating system that preceded Windows?

Look up e.g. CP/M, mate. Or wait, I'll do it for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M -- Digital Research, Inc./ Gary Kildall.

 

2 minutes ago, aDoomGuy said:

You say you know what Kilo means, yet half a sentence later you forget. Kilo means one thousand. That is what the word means in Greek, so why should it be different when it comes to bytes or bits?

Because bytes are multiples of 8 bits. It's how computers function and, like I mentioned, e.g. kilobytes have meant 1024 bytes all the way from the beginning. Context does matter.

 

3 minutes ago, aDoomGuy said:

It is not HDD manufacturers that deviate from established standards it is the makers of operating systems that are deviating from standards

Not just OSes, but pretty much EVERYTHING related to computers, then. Take e.g. RAM: an 8GB stick of RAM is reported as 8GB, but it does have 8589934592 bytes of space in it, not 8000000000 bytes. Similarly, CPU-caches use multiples of 1024, Flash-memory uses multiples of 1024, all sorts of tools that measure network-usage, RAM-usage etc. use multiples of 1024. Do I need to continue?

[Enderman]

 

30 minutes ago, aDoomGuy said:

It is not that HDD/SSD manufacturers like to cheat. 

A 1TB HDD/SSD does in fact have 1TB of storage, it is just operating systems that gives a different reading.

This ^^^

 

40 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

HDD- and SSD-manufacturers like to cheat with the numbers they report,

 

No, they report the correct number.

A Gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes

A Gibibyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes

 

In windows "this PC" it shows in GiB not GB.

If you want to see GB you need to right click the drive and look at properties, where you can see the number of bytes.

So technically windows should say TiB not TB.

4 000 000 000 bytes is 4TB

[Soppro]

As Enderman said above, it's confusing because Windows reports the drive in 'TB', which a reasonable person would think as terabytes, however, in reality it is tebibytes so the correct abbreviation would be TiB. 

 

Microsoft did address this in a devblog post: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090611-00/?p=17933 saying that because literally no one uses 'TiB', they just stuck with TB. Interestingly, macOS changed this way back (so 1TB = 1000GB) although it was only a recent change with iOS.