Why is the 500GB hard disk have less than 466 GB?
This was a question that one of my friends asks me after buying a new 500 GB Hard Disk. I really didn’t ask that question to myself. So, I couldn’t answer that instantly. After a few days of information searching I realize the truth. So, here I’m going bring the facts the way I told my friend.
- All Hard Disk manufacturer way of counting space is different from the way a software count a space. This means to a Hard Disk Manufacturer, 1GB is 1000 MB, 1 MB is 1000 KB and so on.
- Software or computer language recognize a space in terms of power of 2 say \(2^1\), \(2^2\), \(2^3\) etc. hence a KB is \(2^{10}\) Bytes which is 1024 Bytes.
- Lets do a little math:
From a Manufacturer a 500 GB hard disk is 500 x 1000 x 1000 x 1000 = 500,000,000,000 Bytes
From the Computer Language point of view a 500,000,000,000 Bytes is:
\[\frac{500,000,000,000}{1024*1024*1024} = 465.66 \text{ GB}\]
Now you’ll see why your 500GB hard disk has only less than 466 GB space in total. Well if you go with higher space like 1 TB and so on the space missing is increasing. You do the math. I cant do the math well for higher no.
The question is why did manufacturer cheat us? Everybody is cheated, when will this be corrected. I guess not soon.
