Hard Drive - why is 2 TB only 1.8 TB ??

jm1996a said:

Hi Folks - new member, first thread.

I have several hard drives, mostly Western Digital.

The advertised 2 TB only shows up as 1.8 TB, and so keeping it below the 80-90 percent full means it is pretty much "full" at about 1.5 TB.

Ditto my 1 TB, which shows up as 900 MB, and my 1.5 TB which shows up as 1.3 TB.

So the questions:
- why do they advertise as 2 TB when its only 90 percent of that ?
- am i doing the right thing by keeping the drives below about 80-90 percent of the 1.8 TB max capacity ?

- OR -

- do i really have a full 2 TB capacity, and its just formatted to display "full" at the 90% point of 2 TB, which is 1.8 TB (in other words i can safely store up to a full 1.8 TB point, rather than 80-90 percent of THAT).......

thanks guys, i'll look forward to the reply,

jm

Goodaye jm
Have a read of this

HDD's - the Advertized size vs the Actual size.

Bright Blessings

Hi jm1996a and welcome to Windows 7 Forums

For an explanation of this, see: HDD's - the Advertized size vs the Actual size.

nitrous said:

Because it is advertising trick. The actual size of 2TB hard drive is 2,000,000,000,000 bytes (yeah, 2 million millions), which roughly converts into 1.8ish TB. Same goes for every hard drive.

It is not a trick. It is a matter of mathematics. The advertised number is decimal but the system shows a binary number which is 7% less in the GB range and about 10% less in the TB range. But both numbers reflect the same number of bytes. It all has to do with the fact that 1K is 1000 bytes in decimal but 1024 bytes in binary.

whs said:

It is not a trick. It is a matter of mathematics.

Thank you. I get tired of reading about this year after year as if it's one shady manufacturer doing it and taking advantage of customers.

To the OP: I'm not irritated that you didn't understand this...it's just the people who report that it's intentional misleading through advertising. It's just the way it is. It's easier to simplify for humans.

LOL, on another forum last year, a Canadian lady even wanted to take the manufacturer to court for false advertising. We had a hard time to keep her from doing that.

theog said:

Take a look here:
Hard Drive Size Capacities Calculator

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