Soldato
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Im about to click buy on a new HDD and was wondering how much of a 1TB drive is actually useable, 900GB or so ?
About to buy a 1TB, how much will i see ?
- Thread starter Dicehunter
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awesome thanks bud 
I've got both external and internal 1TB drives, one shows up at 956GB and the other is 973GB, and my internal 2TB is at 1838GB, so as you can see, there is no way to tell as data loss is random, you can buy 2 drives, exactly the same and I highly doubt they'd have the exact same capacity
Hi Jay, are those the capacities reported by windows?
This is probably down to the difference between GB/TB (which disk manufacturers use) and GiB/TiB (which windows uses but then incorrectly calls 'GB' just to confuse everyone). A 1TB drive is 10^12 bytes, and 1TiB is 2^40 bytes, so 1 TB works out to be 931GiB. If you're seeing more than that then your disks are either bigger than 1TB and/or the capacity is being reported in GB not GiB.
This is probably down to the difference between GB/TB (which disk manufacturers use) and GiB/TiB (which windows uses but then incorrectly calls 'GB' just to confuse everyone). A 1TB drive is 10^12 bytes, and 1TiB is 2^40 bytes, so 1 TB works out to be 931GiB. If you're seeing more than that then your disks are either bigger than 1TB and/or the capacity is being reported in GB not GiB.
Soldato
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Both my Samsung 1TB HDD's show up as 931GB usable in windows.
Soldato
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As Wonko points out, the apparent loss in capacity is actually to do with different definitions of what "GB" means to Hard drive manufacturers and software companies.
The big discrepancy between 1000GB and 931GB is not due to data loss or formatting losses - but a difference between how two different parts of the PC industry count.
As for "1TB" drives that report more than 931GB, it may be because they use a number of platters where the total doesn't add up to 1TB (eg 3x350GB platters) -so they round down to 1TB for marketing simplicity.
The big discrepancy between 1000GB and 931GB is not due to data loss or formatting losses - but a difference between how two different parts of the PC industry count.
As for "1TB" drives that report more than 931GB, it may be because they use a number of platters where the total doesn't add up to 1TB (eg 3x350GB platters) -so they round down to 1TB for marketing simplicity.
Yeah thats what Windows says
HDD manufacturers don't tend to give space away for free.
A lot of HDD's use platters which would add up to more than the stated capacity of the drive but the firmware limits the amount of accessible space to the stated capacity of the drive.
It would be interesting to see screenshots of 1TB drives that report a capacity of more than ~931GB.
A lot of HDD's use platters which would add up to more than the stated capacity of the drive but the firmware limits the amount of accessible space to the stated capacity of the drive.
It would be interesting to see screenshots of 1TB drives that report a capacity of more than ~931GB.