Tuesday 16 October 2012

Why is the 1 TB Hard Drive only 930 GB?


Recently, I was thinking about getting an external hard drive and I saw one on sale at staple. It was a 1 TB portable HD; I wanted to buy it, but before that I want to make sure f its spec and that is why I was online looking for some basic review or thought on it. Then I came upon one of the comment and it talked about how he/she got rip off because his TB HD was in fact and 930 GB. Then I was thinking to myself, I wonder how many people don’t know that? So here I am talking about it:

When you buy a TB HD, they did not rip you off. There are in fact Tera (1,000,000,000,000) PHYSICAL Bytes. That is important because computer think in binary(0 and 1), that is only two values and if they want to calculate with bigger number, they add another digit in front of it(once again, a 0 or 1) just like how we add another digit in front when we hit 9. In that way, we calculated as 10^X and computers as binary is 2^X. If you don't see it yet, there is not integer (whole number, no decimals) value of X for 2^X will produce 1000. The closest is 2^10, which is 1024, then the computer calculated the amount of TB by dividing 1024(instead of 1000 because of how data are store in computer) and so it end up with ~930 GB in total. The one who sold it to you did not lie, but they did omit the most important information.

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