Missing drive space...a rip-off?

Q. My hard drive space doesn’t have as much storage space as the documentation says it should. Did I get ripped off?

A. No. The difference is due to contrasting methods for measuring drive capabilities. The Operating System (Windows) measures the drive’s capacity according to a gigabyte’s real value of 1,073,741,824 bytes. In contrast, drive manufacturers measure a drive’s capacity by rounding the value of a gigabyte to exactly 1 billion bytes. The 73-million-byte-difference, when multiplied by a number of gigabytes, accounts for the discrepancy between the drive’s actual size and advertised capacities.

So if you purchased a 60 Gigabyte drive, you can calculate the true capacity by dividing the 60 billion bytes by the true value of a gigabyte (in bytes). In this example, the drive would have a capacity of approximately 55.9 Gigabytes.

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