less storage then what i paid for?

[Lilninjsways]

hello I bought a WD Black 1 tb hard drive and installing Windows 10 and after that a bunch of games on steam so my lil brothers ready to go for his bday... (june 27th) I wrote my petition onto the hard drive but it said it only had 932 gb... why is that?

[Marcseli]

It might be because of windows and the storage it takes up, and perhaps other vital programs.

[NoRomanBatmansAllowed]

Haha!

 

Welcome to the glorious world of computer marketing!

 

In short, GB != GiB

 

Windows measures using the smaller one while the manufacturers measure with the larger number. 

 

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Difference-between-GiB-and-GB

[Mira Yurizaki]

8 minutes ago, Lilninjsways said:

hello I bought a WD Black 1 tb hard drive and installing Windows 10 and after that a bunch of games on steam so my lil brothers ready to go for his bday... (june 27th) I wrote my petition onto the hard drive but it said it only had 932 gb... why is that?

1TB to a hard drive manufacturer is exactly 1 trillion bytes. 1TB to a computer is 2^40 bytes. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

Edited May 30, 2017 by M.Yurizaki

[Meag]

12 minutes ago, Lilninjsways said:

hello I bought a WD Black 1 tb hard drive and installing Windows 10 and after that a bunch of games on steam so my lil brothers ready to go for his bday... (june 27th) I wrote my petition onto the hard drive but it said it only had 932 gb... why is that?

In short when you buy a drive it will not have 100% of the advertised space on it, due to the was storage is seen by the computer, Installing windows also would take up some space on that drive further lowering the capacity.

[minibois]

1GB = 1000MB

1GiB = 1024MiB.

 

Windows measures in the latter, HDD manufacturers in the first. a 1TB drive would be 931.323 GiB (or just 932 'GB' like Windows would say).

[Enderman]

Right click it and look at the properties.

This is what a 4TB drive looks like.

Windows shows the capacity as GiB instead of GB, so that's why it looks like less.

It's still >4 000 000 000 000 bytes.

[Oshino Shinobu]

Your system works in binary (base 2). It uses the base 2 system of Mebibytes, Gibibytes, Tebibytes and so on. There are 1024 Mebibytes in a Gibibyte and 1024 Gibibytes in a Tebibyte and so on. The unit abbreviations for these are KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB and so on. 

 

Hard drive manufacturers measure capacity in decimal (base 10) because really, it's easier for people to understand and nice round numbers sound nicer to us humans. The base 10 system uses Kilobytes (Kilo=1000), Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes and so on. There are 1000 Megabytes in a Gigabyte, 1000 Gigabytes in a Terabyte and so on. Unit abbreviations are KB, MB, GB, TB and so on. 

 

Windows doesn't convert the binary values into decimal but still uses the abbreviations for the decimal system for some reason. The sizes shown are not incorrect, but the wrong unit abbreviations are being used by Windows. 

 

1000 Gigabytes (what the drive manufacturer measures) is equivalent to 931.323 Gibibytes (what your system uses). Your drive is still 1TB, which is the same as 931.323GiB.

 

The issue is that Windows just uses the wrong unit abbreviations. I do wish MS would just implement a simple conversion that converts all values to decimal. It prevents the misunderstanding of drives appearing lower capacity to those who don't know the reason. Back when I worked in retail we actually had some people that would try to return USB drives for not being the size advertised, when really it was just showing a different unit. 

 

There also seems to be a lack of knowledge of the existence of Mebi, Gibi, Tebi etc. I admit they sound stupid (Gibi, really?) but they should be taught in IT courses. During my degree, we were taught that there is 1024 Megabytes in a Gigabyte, which is not true as it's a decimal (base 10) system. 

 

EDIT: Also, be careful with how you write/type unit abbreviations, it can cause confusion due to their different meanings. 

 

For example, in your post, you're writing "tb" and "gb" which are Terabit and Gigabit due to the lower case "b" (the T and G should always be capital until you're writing a unit that calls for a lower case). The difference between them makes a huge difference in unit size. A Tb (Terabit) is 1/8th the size of a TB (Terabyte), so a 1Tb (Terabit) drive would be the same as 125GB (Gigabyte) drive. It's a common mistake that causes issues most commonly with networking. Almost all networking products and bandwidth quotes will use bits. When they compare their network bandwidth to their download speed, they think it's significantly slower when in really it's just that networking tends to use bits, so Megabits (Mb), while download speed will often show in bytes, so Megabytes (MB).