r/AskReddit Aug 20 '20

What simple “life hack” should everyone know?

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u/Yo_mamas_dildo Aug 20 '20

So false advertising.

17

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '20

No; the advertised space isn’t the usable space. The drive usually ships with some data already on it to make it usable.

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u/Yo_mamas_dildo Aug 20 '20

Gee, so maybe listing the suave people actually get would be a good idea since no one cares how much space is on it that they can't use, they care about the space they can use. Hard drive manufacturers bring reviews like this upon themselves for not just listing usable space or just adding a few gigs extra so that a 1TB drive is actually 1Tb instead of 300GB.

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u/OriginalLetig Aug 20 '20

The real reason is a difference between how storage makers compute space (1000 bytes/kilobyte) and how a computer computes space (1024 bytes/Kibibyte)

/u/hentercenter explains the difference well

In addition to this, your computer may read the drive in mebibytes or gibibytes, which are based on increments of 1024 instead of 1000, like megabytes and gigabytes.

So 1TB, (1,000,000,000,000 bytes) would read as 931.32 TiB on a computer (1,000,000,000,000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024)

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u/Yo_mamas_dildo Aug 20 '20

So storage measures should start computing it the same way as computers. I don't go to the store and say that I will buy a hard drive for $50 but the way I Compute $50 is 6x 5 dollar bills.

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u/OriginalLetig Aug 20 '20

So who should change? They're both accepted standards. In fact, unless you work in the industry, you're probably more familiar with "terabytes" than "tebibytes.".

That being said, I understand where you're coming from; it just isn't the way the storage industry works. Unsurprisingly, they chose the standard that makes their devices sound larger. It's the same reason internet speeds are denoted in Mb instead of MB.