Why is 500GB Hard Drive showing as 465GB?

Created by Dariusz Dubis, Modified on Thu, 25 Mar, 2021 at 5:39 PM by Dariusz Dubis

The reason for this difference lies in the way hard drive manufacturers advertise their devices, versus the way Windows computers actually use the storage devices. There’s also some overhead required when Windows formats your drive, for the file system and boot data, though in comparison to today’s large hard drives, it’s not a lot. To a hard disk manufacturer, one KB is 1000 bytes, one MB is 1000 KB, and one GB is 1000 MB. Essentially, if a hard disk is advertised as 500GB, it contains 500 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = 500,000,000,000 bytes of space. The hard disk manufacturer thus advertises the disk as a 500 GB hard disk. However, manufacturers of RAM don’t sell it in even groups of 1000 – they use groups of 1024. When you’re buying memory, a KB is 1024 bytes, a MB is 1024 KB, and a GB is 1024 MB. 


To work back from the 500,000,000,000 bytes above: 

500,000,000,000 / (1024*1024*1024) = 465.66 GB 


If you are not familiar with Hard Drive / SSD technology you can Google more info about it.

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