Why Are Computer Drives Smaller Than Advertised?

Plenty of people saying that 1024 is correct and the hard drive manufacturers changed it up. To that I say, the SI prefixes have existed for 200 years and you can’t just redefine them to mean 1024 and expect it to go over well. They should have made a new unit from the beginning instead of redefining the universally accepted system.

Why is this video 1 second shorter than advertised?

My game design and programming teacher didn't know this when he was teaching us about file sizes and I struggled to explain it to him. I'll have to show him this video.

Alternative title "their not lying you are just on windows"

I had always assumed the "missing" storage was taken up by system type files to make the storage device work... though I guess actually thinking about that for a few seconds that makes alot less sense when you get to GB sizes...

It's been great seeing the journey of ThioJoe from Master Troll to genuinely helpful and informative tech guy.

Some of you OG viewers may have realized this is basically an updated remake of a video I made on my other channel in 2014 👀. I figured it would be good to make a more detailed explanation. Here's the original which I've unlisted because it's now redundant, if you're curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DufUYmtVYYU

For GPU VRAM this is often the opposite way. GPU memory is stated in GiB, so in GB you get a bit more, like 17179MB / 16384MiB in a card marketed as 16GB.

If I remember, Maxtor was the first HDD company to switch to 1 MB = 1 million bytes in their labeling in the early/mid 1990s. Everyone else used 1 MB = 2^20 bytes. Maxtor (now a part of Seagate) was a low-end budget HDD manufacturer back then, and someone in their marketing division saw this as an easy way to sell a smaller drive which could "compete" with larger drives from other manufacturers. Everyone complained about it, but since they were actually using the correct SI definition they couldn't really stop Maxtor from doing it. One by one, each HDD manufacturer switched. The last holdout was IBM (which became Hitachi, which became WD), who switched around 2000.

"Back then, every Megabyte matter" - YES ✔️

By the way, my biggest issue is with SSD manufacturers that make 256GB or 512GB storage drives, but are actually using decimal GB, despite values being in power 2, misleading users think they using binary round units (what is SI calling GiB).

"There's not anyone out there who would notice...". Trust me, if MS does this without properly communicating it to their user base, there's going to be a lot of people who would notice and even be freaked out about it think it was some kind of a virus or that they got hacked.

The problem is originally it was 1024 for each level and drive manufacturers used the same term to mean 1000 to make the drives look bigger.

this rounding error also affects resolutions standards, 3840 is close enough to 4k but 7680 for 8k is pushing it a bit. 16k would be 15360 and 32k will straight up be only 30720 if we continue down this path.

who tf gave them these cute ass names 💀

This is great. I'm so glad that you've taken the time to make a video explaining this. I've been raging for years that Microsoft (and a few others) mixes up the unit labels like this. Plus, it seems like a lot of tech youtubers will hand-wave it away as "filesystem overhead" and such. Thank you for making this, and explaining it as well as you have. It blows me away that in order to "not confuse people" Microsoft's decision is to display units that actively make computer storage more confusing.

Having been in the industry since the very early 1980's, RAM has always been measured and sold in "computer" kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes, meaning exponents of 2, and still is today. The first hard disk that I used with any regularity since the USAF bought them by the truckload, was the Seagate ST-225, which was marketed as a 20MB disk drive with just under 21 million bytes of storage. When formatted, MS-DOS reported it as 20MB. Seagate at that time used the binary measurement. As hard disk capacities increased, one of the hard disk manufacturer's marketing departments (unfortunatley, I cannot recall which one), had the bright idea to make their drives look bigger than the competition by using the exponent of 10 definition for megabytes and beyond, so since Seagate didn't want to be left behind, they followed suit. Everything else in a computer device uses exponents of 2. Even at the fundamental level, hard disks either have 512-byte or 4096-byte sectors (binary math if there ever was), yet the total storage capacity eschews that for sheer marketability.

Unless I'm mistaken, HDD manufacturers used to use the binary calculation and you got 1024MB per GB give or take. But they decided to start using the decimal calculation about 25ish years ago as a way to artificially increase sizes. I have some old HDDs that still work that have the old storage numbers line up perfectly with the Windows calculations.

I love how you make videos that take things I already know and explain them better than I can. Gives me somewhere to point people I can't seem to explain these things to.

I always wanted to know this, I thought that hard drives brought less space due to some manufacturing issue, and I completely accepted it, it's good to know that all that missing space is still there