However, if you select all the files on your C: drive (including hidden files and Windows system files), right-click them, and select Properties, you’ll notice something odd. If you right-click your C: drive in Windows, you’ll see a certain amount of space referred to as “Used Space” – in the screenshot below, the hard disk contains 279 GB of files. You’ll probably notice something odd about the amount of free space your hard drive contains, if you look closely.
Why Your Computer Shows the Wrong Amount of Free Space
If hard disks were advertised in terms of the amount of space they actually contained when you connected them to your Windows computer, a 1 TB hard drive would be labeled a 931 GB hard drive instead.Īlternatively, Windows could update their UI to use the correct definition of gigabyte–other operating systems, like OS X, have already changed their representation to correctly state the right amount of space. That’s a difference of nearly 35 GB over what the average buyer would be led to believe a hard drive contains. Keep in mind that the hard drive manufacturers are using the accurate description of the terms–the prefix giga, for instance, means a power of 1000, whereas the correct term for powers of 1024 is gibibyte, though it isn’t often used. Unfortunately, Windows has always calculated hard drives as powers of 1024 while hard drive manufacturers use powers of 1000. When you’re buying memory, a KB is 1024 bytes, a MB is 1024 KB, and a GB is 1024 MB. However, manufacturers of RAM don’t sell it in even groups of 1000 – they use groups of 1024. The hard disk manufacturer thus advertises the disk as a 500 GB hard disk. To a hard disk manufacturer, one KB is 1000 bytes, one MB is 1000 KB, and one GB is 1000 MB. There’s also some overhead required when Windows formats your drive, for the file system and boot data, though in comparison to today’s large hard drives, it’s not a lot. The reason for this difference lies in the way hard drive manufacturers advertise their devices, versus the way Windows computers actually use the storage devices. If you’ve paid attention to hard drives, USB flash drives, and other storage devices, you may have noticed that they always have less space than promised once they’re formatted. Why Your Hard Drive Shows Less Space Than Advertised
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