In any case, it could be considered a bit of a lie on their part, since they use a legal loophole to make us believe that these storage units have more capacity than they actually bring.
What is the real capacity of a flash drive?
Suddenly one day you buy a 2 GB USB memory because it is enough to store that 1.8 GB movie you have on your computer, however, when you try to insert it, you realize that you do not have enough space. Doesn’t make much sense right? Well yes, it has its explanation.
Everything is due to marketing and the permission they have to express their data in decimal format, that is, when you go to buy a 1 GB flash drive, legally these do not have to be 1024 MB like they really should.
The Seagate website, one of the largest manufacturers of hard drives, explains it very clearly.
Hard drive manufacturers market drives in terms of decimal capacity (decimal numbering system). In decimal notation, a megabyte (MB) equals 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) equals 1,000,000,000 bytes, and a terabyte (TB) equals 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.
Due to this, the greater the storage capacity you want to acquire, the more space they will be “ripping off” you.
Everything comes because really a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytesTherefore, we will be losing that excess peak not only in that MB, but in all the following ones, and this can make a good sum.
A practical example can be seen in a hard disk or a 1 TB pen drive, this would only have 931 GB available. Something that is far from reality, since a terabyte would have to be 1024 gigabytes. They are “stealing” us almost 100 GB.
This is something that we can normalize if we buy a computer with a disk that comes with less capacity, since we know that the OS will take up space, as well as the partitions that it has and the data necessary for its operation.
However, the fact that it is proportional to the space is worrying, especially if we are looking for a very high capacity. For example, a few days ago I bought a NAS with a prepared 4 TB disk, and as you can guess, my real capacity is 3.6 TB. We could say that in general terms they have taken 400 GB from my face. They are not the 10 or 15 that an operating system can occupy, we are talking about very high amounts.
But this works like this with all brands and providers, therefore it is something that you have to take into account, especially in high capacities, and calculate for yourself before buying, what the reality will be.
To give you an idea, of each gigabyte is lost in its conversion from decimal to binary, around 70 MBso you can make the account easily.
