Why does my empty hard drive show less space than what I bought?
Wondering why your new 500GB hard drive only shows 460GB of storage space available? Hard drive manufacturers calculate hard drive sizes using base 10, where 1000 bytes equals one kilobyte. But computers do everything in binary (base 2), where it takes 1024 bytes to store a kilobyte of data. In addition, the computer’s OS uses part of the drive for a directory to keep track of the actual data. As a result, the usable capacity of a hard drive is typically 90 to 93% of the advertised capacity.
Published March 24, 2009 12:00 PM
Last modified on June 16, 2009 5:28 PM
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