In these days, the storage of a computer and other devices is measured in gigabytes (GB) and in terabytes (TB). Your phone may have a small value of gigabytes in which you can store various apps, contacts, emails, text messages, images, videos and more.
In the case of the hard drive of your computer, the storage may have few hundreds of gigabytes. However, the external drives may have similar storage capacity and sometimes in terabytes. The question is what does it mean really?
So, we need to go to the basic and try understanding it.
Bit – All computing devices operate with binary digits which are called as a bit. One bit can have a value of 0 or 1, which is also equivalent of off and on.
Byte – One byte consists of eight binary digits or a bit, like 10010011.
Kilobyte (KB) – The smallest size of the file stored in your device is typically four kilobytes. One kilobyte means 1024 bytes or 1024×8 = 8192 bits or binary digits.
Megabyte (MB) – This unit contains 1024 KB which is equal to one megabyte.
Gigabyte (GB)- This storage unit consists of 1024 MBs.
Terabyte (TB) – In this unit means 1024 GB which is called as one terabyte.
Almost all the manufacturers of hard drives have worked on the system which rounds down things to make the tackling of data a little bit easier. This also mean it provide less storage capacity.
This implies that 1000 bytes is equivalent to 1 kilobyte. Similarly, 1000 kilobytes is equal to 1 MB. By this convention, 1000MB = 1 GB and 1000 GB is equivalent to 1 TB.
When it comes to Microsoft Windows, it follows the 1024 rule which implies that 250GB is considered as 232GB and 1TB drive is equal to 931GB.
This is the reason why most of the hard drives seem to have a lower capacity than the capacity advertised by the companies. So, 1 TB hard drive consists of 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. By following the 1024 rule and dividing this number, we get 976.562,500 KB. By similarly following the rule we get 953,674.3 MB, and finally, it ends up at 931.32 GB.
We hope that this clears your doubts and resolve the issue that why we get less storage amount than it is actually told by the manufacturers of the hard drives. If you found this information useful, then do leave your comment in the section below.