Why your flash storage capacity is showing less than what was advertised

Are manufacturers lying about the actual drive space?

    Just a month ago, I bought a terabyte's worth of a portable hard drive. I was delighted once I got it unboxed and backed up all my files. There's one thing in particular which caught my attention, the space. It's a terabyte so I did expect just a little bit of 'stolen' space on it. 

Then came out it was 931MB.

It isn't alarming but quite surprising how companies falsify their advertisements.

    However, my last sentence was a slip. Companies actually advertise the real deal. A 1TB is in fact a 1TB double-quadruple platters inside of a drive. Not only applies to hard drives but to every storage. A 16GB Thumb Drive indeed has 16GB on it. 

    Well, the misconstrued suspect being; the hardware you just bought isn't the culprit. Turns out, it's your computer. You see computers understand everything through binaries. I'm not going to go deep on that matter but to simplify things, we humans understand the decimal, computers in contrast, binaries. Decimals use the power of 10, whilst binaries to the power of 2. It's that simple.

    You wouldn't want to buy a drive stating 1,000,097,705,984 bytes. That would be downright confusing wouldn't it? Hence why manufacturers opted for a decimal based system for us human being to understand it more visually-wise. 

Here's a few tips I learned from a forum on how to convert a GB to the real capacity showed on a computer:

1. Take the 7% of the given GB (hereafter; N) then subtract N from the 7% you just took.

    Formula: N - 0.07(N)

    Example: 1000 - 0.07(1000)                      (This example takes a 1TB disk or 1000GB)

                     1000 - 70                           

                     = 930MB

2. Take the N and divide it by 1.024 three times. This method works better than the above.

    Formula: N / 1.024 / 1.024 / 1.024

    Example: 1000 / 1.024 / 1.024 / 1.024

                   = 931MB

3. Take the N and multiply it by .931322

   Formula: N * .931322

   Example: 1000 * .931322

                   = 931MB

I would recommend the last two options. Next time you hit the store to buy a storage device, you can calculate how much you'll get. What are your thoughts on drive capacity? Tell us in the comments!