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?

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

"Back then, every Megabyte matter" - YES ✔️

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

"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.

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.

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).

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.

ive been into PC's and building them since 1996 and I always wondered in the last 6 to 7 years what's up with the dives and not getting the full TB thank you for this video i learned so much today.

This is genuinely so informative and well explained, thank you for making content like this, I remember being younger and trying your how to turn your Xbox 360 to an Xbox one (when that was new), it's neat seeing you not only still be around but actually make really helpful and informative content :)

I have seen a lot of creators and videos but the energy and information thio provides is in another level! I'm already an advanced user but I only watch these videos cuz they're just awesome! Waiting for new ones!!

Thank you for this refresher Thiojoe. I remember you did a video like this many years ago but over the years I had forgotten the exact details. Great to get this all into my head again so I can explain this to the 'geeks' at work and seem smart lol.

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