Why is Hard Drive Capacity Different from Advertised Sizes ?

There must have been times when you bought a hard drive or a memory card and realized that the hard drive capacity shown on the package is more than the available space. Ever wondered why the available space was lesser ?

Well, the capacity of the hard drive is the same as what is advertised on the package. The discrepancy in the available space and the advertised space is due to the way the capacity of a hard drive is calculated.

There are methods used to calculate how much information can be stored on the hard disk drive. They are base-2 system and the base-10 system.

In the base-2 system used by the OS, 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes. While the base-10 system used by the manufacturing company, 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes.

The table below shows the difference for some commonly used drive capacities.