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Why are hard drives never as large as advertised?

Fresh7 days ago
Mar 15, 202618369 views
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Problem

From all the hard drives I have bought, they never seem to be as large as the advertised size; from 320 GB down to 290 GB, from 500 GB down to 450 GB, etc. Is there a technical reason for this?

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Fix for: Why are hard drives never as large as advertised?

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The technical reason is that the hard drive manufacturers sell you capacities in metric units. So a GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes by the metric system. However, computers measure the drive size in powers of 2. So 1GiB = 1,024MiB, 1MiB = 1,024KiB, etc. Wh…

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