4TB HDD Question

[G27Racer_188]

We all know that you don't get all space of your HDD usable, so I was wondering how many TB(or GB) do you get usable from 4TB HDDs.

 

So is it better to get 1 4TB drive, or 2 2TB drives? (They won't be in RAID, space is not an issue) 

[Slash003]

You loose rougly around 100 GB per Terabyte. So either way you will only get 3.6 terabytes.

[ShadowCaptain]

We all know that you don't get all space of your HDD usable, so I was wondering how many TB(or GB) do you get usable from 4TB HDDs.

 

So is it better to get 1 4TB drive, or 2 2TB drives? (They won't be in RAID, space is not an issue) 

 

4x 1tb drives gives you the same amount of storage as 1x4tb, will be like @Slash003 says about 3.6tb

[TheGeekster]

Yep, you'll loose 80-100Gb per terabyte as Slash said, I've got 2 6Tb reds and they give 5.4TB storage each, it's not about the amount of drives, it's purely down to how much space you'll have.

[Slash003]

Ye I got a 2TB harddrive for my first rig (and my only made a few weeks ago) and it comes up as 1863 GB so I rounded figures to 1800 GB so yes 100 GB lost per terabyte an explanation to why that is listed here: http://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/arent-hard-drives-truly-size-say-are-23017.html

[Ertman]

It's just how it's calculated like the link provided by slash.

[DirkW]

The problem is that Windows actually shows Gibibytes while still calling them Gigabytes. That's where the difference comes from. Pretty much all promised space is actually usable, just some OS don't report it correctly (i.e. numbers with the correct corresponding unit.)

[TheGeekster]

That, and the formatting actually takes up space itself, if you have for example a 4GB memory stick, if you format it as FAT32, it'll show nearly the entire 4Gb, but if you use NTFS, it'll slow about 3.75-3.85GB

[G27Racer_188]

Thank you all for clarifying. I just wasn't sure if "lost space" was growing exponentially, or whether it is constant (which it is)