“Is this 20 TB drive really a 18 TB drive ? What is a 18 TB hard drive at least 17 TB ? Sounds like a big waste of money.”
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The 20 TB is 20 trillion bytes. Historically, memory size was generally some power of 2 because of the addressing scheme. When we got to 1024 bytes (2^10) that was called 1 KB. The metric prefix "kilo" means 1000, so we have this disparity of 1024 vs. 1000. You knew which was meant by the context: if it was memory size, then it was 1024. As we increase to MB, GB, TB and upward, each step up is a factor of 1024 rather than 1000. So 1 TB memory would be (1024^4) bytes. The other piece of information to know is with hard drives, your operating system reports the capacity in terms of memory size (i.e. factors of 1024, not 1000), but marketing departments sell their harddrives with sizes using the definitions based on factors of 1000. Therefore a 20 trillion bytes drive will have its capacity reported by your operating system as 20E12 / (1024^4) = about 18.2 TB.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.Back in the day, when hard drives were smaller the the actual size vs the advertised size, wasn't that noticeable. However with todays drives being so large, 24KB adds up. 1 terabyte is 1,024 gigabytes, but manufactures count a terabyte as 1,000 gigabytes.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.Formatted capacity is always 10% less on every hard drive. All brands.
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