Bought 2TB - Need Help with Space Calculation

[craige4u]

Hello,

I just got 2TB HDD and a few confusion:

1] In order to get one partition of 50GB I allocated 51200MB… but after format it turned out to be 49.9GB only. The calculation above is correct as I used this before and I never got it wrong. (NOTE: 100MB windows partition is already created separately.)

In order to solve this I havd tried 51250MB, then it shows full 50GB.. Whts wrong here? is it related to sum new 4K sector as mentioned in the link below?

2] Another partition I created of 1.77TB and it shows 1.76TB free, whole 1GB less ?

3] Can u pls calculate and tellme tht If u combine both partitions, am I getting full capacity of a 2TB HDD after format? I am not able to add properly, I guess poor maths !

Link to my HDD : http://www.seagate.com/www/en-au/pro...a_hard_drives/

Thx

 

[corkyg]

The difference between decimal and binary systems of measurement. Hard drive manufacturers and other storage devices use the decimal system to measure size.

1KB = 1000 bytes, 1MB = 1000 KBs, 1GB = 1000MBs, and 1TB=1000GBs.

Computers, however, are binary machines, so 1KB=1024KBs 1MB = 1024 KBs, 1GB = 1024MBs, and 1TB=1024GBs.

With a completely blank 2TB hard drive, if you do the math, you can expect it to read as 1862GBs, or approximately 1.8TBs

This question has arisen many times over the past decades. The 1024 binary size also affects your partitions - they will end up in multiples of 1024.

 

[elswick]

corkyg explained it very well.

Just one thing to add :

2] Another partition I created of 1.77TB and it shows 1.76TB free, whole 1GB less ?

The difference is probably due to the file system. It takes some place so you can't use all 1.77TB just for your personal use.

 

[PIntag]

To get the OS to report the full 50GB, you'll have to set the partition to 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 * 50 = 53,687,091,200.