why did the external hard drive that i bought has only 232 gbs , while the box said it would have 250?

Question

I bought an ex hard drive and box said , it had 250 gbs and i turned it on and it only has 232 gbs? what's the problem here? why do they lie?

Answer 1

Because people keep mis-measuring KB, MB, and GB. For marketing, they usually use KB to mean 1000, MB 1000000, and GB 1000000000 bytes. In reality, KB is 1024, MB is 1048576, and GB is 1073741824.

Answer 2

It has become common practice for people to round gigabytes, megabytes and kilobytes to the nearest thousandth. In reality, a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes... A megabyte is really 1024 kilobytes... and a kilobyte is really 1024 bytes. What does this mean you ask? Some hard drive manufacturers consider 1,000,000,000 bytes to be a gigabyte, when a TRUE gigabyte is actually 1,073,741,824 bytes. (1024 to the 3rd power)

Using this methodology, your hard drive states to have 250,000,000,000 bytes. When your Operating System calculates gigabytes, it uses the REAL calculation and not the rounded-off version.

250,000,000,000 bytes / 1024 = 244,140,625 kilobytes
244,140,625 kilobytes / 1024 = 238,419 megabytes
238,419 megabytes / 1024 = 232 ACTUAL gigabytes
Note: There are lengthy remainders that I rounded off, but you get the idea.

The simpler way to calculate is:
250,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 = 232 ACTUAL gigabytes

Some hard drive manufacturers measure their drives in ACTUAL gigabytes, while others just say how many billion bytes you have and call it gigabytes. You usually have to do some research to figure out which manufacturers report TRUE gigabytes.

Answer 3

Some of the hard drive is used for file keeping purposes and some parts of the dos system that make the disk bootable.

No disk is the size on the box in actual usable space

Answer 4

its not a problem and they havnt lied. Some amount of the data has been consumed by the system files, apart from that, there always remain an ambguity regaurding the disk size calculation. since 1MB = 1024 Bytes, so by calculation in GBytes, it will show 250 GBytes, but actually it is around 235,000MBytes

Answer 5

they are not lying. it IS 250 gb. the system reserves a few gigabytes because it needs some memory to start up and even work. plus, u have drivers installed and the OS, and that takes up meory as well. so don't worry, that is normal. in fact, if it did say you had 250 gb available, i would be concerned. hope this helps explain!

Answer 6

it really is widespread habit. The raw storage skill of the stress is 500GB, yet with the intention to keep stuff on it you pick to partition it and format it into block sizes, which steals away a number of the raw skill. I liken it to slicing a pie with a knife. once you're carried out, various the pie continues to be there, yet a tiny bit is now on the knife. i understand it really is a crude analogy, even if it facilitates me. also, like Brick suggested, there is the region of the thanks to calculate the dimensions; pcs us 1024 Bytes to the KByte, yet manufacturers use one thousand, which, at the same time as into Megabytes and Gigabytes, is an significant volume.

Answer 7

It is because of different sizes of KB/MB/GB/TB/etc.
Though KB = 1024 B, MB = 1024 KB, etc.,
manufacturers always use 1000 instead of the 1024.
So, your HDD has the following capacity:
1024*1024*1024*250 = 249,108,103,168 (bytes).
It is even than 250,000,000,000 but manufacturers always round it up.

Answer 8

Formatting, most likely. Formatted file space is always smaller than unformatted file space.

Answer 9

250gb is the space in dos
232 is the amount in windows format