Why Is hard drive capacity different from advertised sizes?

The technical reason is that the hard drive manufacturers sell you capacities in metric units. So a GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes by the metric system. However, computers measure the drive size in powers of 2. So 1GiB = 1,024MiB, 1MiB = 1,024KiB, etc.

Are hard disks measured in kilobytes?

Operating systems use a binary system to measure disk space, while hard drive manufacturers use a decimal system. Operating system makers like Microsoft and Apple use a binary system to measure kilobyte, megabytes and gigabytes.

Are hard drives measured in bits or bytes?

Both RAM and hard disk capacities are measured in bytes, as are file sizes when you examine them in a file viewer.

How do hard drive manufacturers manipulate the size of a hard drive?

By arranging the boundaries of these magnetic bits in a pattern, it becomes possible to make them smaller without suffering this effect, which increases the amount of information that can be stored in an inch of disk material.

What is the effect of having a hard disk with K=1000?

K=1024: Hard disks do not have such cell architectures, and they are advertized with K=1000. It was some kind of marketing trick in the very beginning, making the disk look larger than you expect, when you set K=1024 as old-fashioned “IT geek”. The effect is that with K=1024, on your computer screen hard disks look SMALLER than advertized.

How much is a KB in MB?

Unfortunately, Microsoft decided to use the following conventions and now the whole world uses it: 1 KB = 1024 Bytes 1 MB = 1024 * 1024 Bytes 1 GB = 1024 * 1024 * 1024 Bytes.

Can I swap a 1TB disk for a bigger one?

All 1Tb disks contain exactly (10^12)/blocksize addressable blocks, and there is never ever any problem swapping a 1Tb drive made by one manufacturer for one made by a different manufacturer (or indeed, for a bigger one … try buying a new 200Gb drive these days. Don’t forget that an MBR-partitioned disk cannot exceed 2Tb, though).

Is 1 KB the same as 1000 bytes?

No, 1 KB = 1000 Bytes! Actually, there is no mB or gB convention, although that would have been logic in the original convention. This is due to the fact that in the 70s – the age of large and expensive computers -, nobody believed that mass storage would actually be achievable at all.