The Digital Age Capacity Puzzle: Why is a TB hard drive only 931GB?

When you buy a hard drive called 1TB and connect to a computer, Windows systems often show it only about 931GB。 This is not a fraud by the manufacturer against the consumer, nor is the hard drive malfunction, but rather stems from two different computing systems.

1. 1000 digit Vs 1024 digit

Vendor standard (decimal): Harddisk producers use 1000 digits to label. 1KB = 1000B, 1MB = 1000KB, 1GB = 1000MB, 1TB = 1000GB。 And by this logic, 1TB is $10 ^12}$bytes.
System Standard (By-digit): Operating systems (especially Windows) are calculated using 1024 digits. 1KB = 1024B, 1MB = 1024KB... 1TB = $1024 ^4 bytes.

When we divide the manufacturer's $1.0 million and $0.00 million by bit by $1024 ^3 the result is exactly what we're getting. 931.3GB。 To resolve this confusion, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) subsequently introduced new names of units such as KiB, MiB, GiB However, the current prevalence rate is still limited.

2. Size of storage unit

From the smallest unit to the largest data centre unit:

Byte (B)： bytes, the basic unit of storage, 1 byte in English and 2-3 byte in Han.
MB (Mixed): It was a huge capacity, and it is now only the size of a single photo.
GB (Gig): The most mainstream unit, a movie or a large game, is usually GB.
TB (too): Standard capacity of hard drives for modern personal computers.
PB (porn): Units used for enterprise-level storage, cloud service providers and large-scale scientific research projects (e.g. black hole photo processing). 1PB = 1024TB。

3. How do you scientifically estimate your storage needs?

Before purchasing cloud space or replacing hard drives, it is proposed that the estimate be based on the following criteria:

Office documents: A typical Word or PDF file usually has between 1 and 5MB, and a 1GB space can store hundreds of documents.
Multimedia entertainment: High-quality photographs of about 5-10MB, high-coded 4K video could consume more than 400MB per minute.
Systems and software: Windows itself is about 20-30GB, and modern 3A games are often over 100GB.

Use ours. Storage unit converter , you can quickly jump between different levels and plan your digital asset storage program precisely.