PC owners report that their actual usable capacity is only 10.9 TB. When reformatted for mac, do you get the full 12TB? null

Question

Trogdor · Accepted Answer

The size difference is not caused by formatting but because of the definition of Terabyte that hard drive manufacturers use (1000 gigabytes) vs what most operating systems do (1024 gigabytes). What Windows reports is actually in Tebibyte and not Terabytes. So you haven't actually lost any space at all, the OS is just giving you a different number. It is very confusing for consumers though and I wish OS makers and hard drive manufacturers would both agree to one definition and stick with it.

Answered by Trogdor 6 years ago

EducatedBuyer · Answer

It's going to be *very* close to 12 TB (terabytes). Note that the people claiming it's only 10.9 TB are mistaken. It is actually 10.9 TiB (tebibytes), which is equal to 12.0 TB (terabytes). Windows still measures disks using the outdated base-1024 system. If you plug it in on a Mac or a Linux system, you'll see 12.0 TB.

Answered by EducatedBuyer 6 years ago

Leejack · Answer

The short answer is yes. The difference is how your OS reports this storage capacity. There is a little overhead (about 2MB), but other than this, you should have pretty close to the advertised amount of storage space.

Answered by Leejack 6 years ago

JimmyCrackcorn · Answer

12 trillion bytes = 12E12 bytes / (1024^4 bytes/TB) = 10.9 TB
Physical memory was developed with binary address lines (such should be no surprise). A memory with an 8-bit (1 byte) word length and 16 address lines has a capacity of 2^16 bytes = 65536 bytes. If, for memory sizes, we use 2^10 = 1024 instead of 1000 to redefine the metric prefixes, then we have nice whole numbers. Instead of 65.536 KB, we have a simpler 64 KB. As memory capacities grew, this scheme was maintained: 1KB = 1024 bytes, 1MB = 1024 KB, 1GB = 1024 MB, 1 TB = 1024 GB.
Hard disk drives are not addressed the same way as a memory array, so the standard power of 10 definition of the metric prefixes is used (manufacturers make this clear in the small print). So this is a 12 trillion byte hard drive -- see the calculation at the start of this post. The windows operating system will report its size using the memory array convention.

Answer

It's a marketing thing. Computers Measure in GiB or TiB and not GB or TB like the manufacturers selling the drives do.

1TB=0.90949470177293 TiB

so 12 X 0.909 = 10.9TB

storage · Answer

Thanks Trogdor. So, I think what you're saying is that in a mac, the 12tb drive will show that it has 12tb capacity. And in a PC (which I do not have), the OS makes you think the capacity is lower, when it actually isn't---correct?

Answered by storage 6 years ago

Nex4500 · Answer

No, yog never get there full amount.

“PC owners report that their actual usable capacity is only 10.9 TB. When reformatted for mac, do you get the full 12TB?”

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