Why 1TB = 931GB ? By Spear Fox
Have you ever wondered why a hard disk of 1 TB capacity shows only 931 GB in your system? Why it is that the manufacturer calls it to be 1 TB hard disk despite it showing 931 GB? Are they cheating you with false storage size? Are they stealing your storage space?
Well, continue reading this blog to know more about it.
There is nothing wrong with either your hard drive or your computer that shows 931 GB for a TB. Isn’t this a good news? Your computer works perfectly alright and your hard drive is also in a good condition.
But still, Did someone steal it? Apparently no, this reduced size is quite normal and will apply regardless of which brand of hard drive or storage device you buy, whatever operating system you use and which computer you install it.
If you ask me where did my storage size go then? I would say it was not available since the beginning.
It is a straight forward reason that can fairly be understood by everyone to get it. The manufacturers use a different method of defining how much storage space is on the drive which is totally different from the method that your computer uses to measure the size.
It is all about 2's and 10's, a 2's for your computer and a 10's for the manufacturers.
According to the International System of Units (or) SI Units (hope you remember SI Units studied during your sixth grade in Physics major) the standard definition of a Terabyte is 1012 and this solves your mystery of missing space.
1012 = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.
I think this will perfectly apply to your computer, when it measures the storage space with a 10's rather a 2's, so you feel that you got the same storage size as promised by your hard disk manufacturer.
Let’s do some little math here to understand why and how much do we lose
Binary approximations of the decimal values is what used by your computer and as a result when you save 1KB file in your disk it occupies 1024 bytes of memory.
1 MB = 10242 = 1,048,576 bytes this is being compare with 1,000,000 bytes of SI Unit space on the hard drive.
Similarly,
1GB = 10243 = 1,073,741,824 bytes (compared with 1,000,000,000).
1TB = 10244 = 1,099,511,628,000 bytes (compared with 1,000,000,000,000).
From the above math you can clearly understand that your computer occupies more than 1MB of space as described by SI units, we can also put this statement in another way saying your computer sees the drive as being smaller than what manufacturers claims it to be the actual size.
Let’s go for the answer to solve our blog title, why it is 931 GB for 1 TB of storage space.
Hope you don’t go weird by seeing the below math.
Your hard disk manufacturer has built a hard drive which physically contains:
1,000,000,000,000 bytes on basis on 10s.
Since your computer uses a 2s to calculate size rather than a 10s, the size will be 931 GB (approx)
931 GB = 931 x 10244 which is approximately equal to 1012 (as described by the manufacturer)
And if this is gonna continue, how much storage size do we lose down the line as our storage usage increases.
| Prefix | Manufacturer's Way - a 10's | Computer's Way - a 2's | Size Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| kilo | 1003 = 10001 | 210 = 10241 | 2.40% |
| mega | 1006 = 10002 | 220 = 10242 | 4.86% |
| giga | 1009 = 10003 | 230 = 10243 | 7.37% |
| tera | 1012 = 10004 | 240 = 10244 | 9.95% |
| peta | 1015 = 10005 | 250 = 10245 | 12.59% |
| exa | 1018 = 10006 | 260 = 10246 | 15.29% |
| zetta | 1021 = 10007 | 270 = 10247 | 18.06% |
| yotta | 1024 = 10008 | 280 = 10248 | 20.89% |
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