Why Are Computer Drives Smaller Than Advertised?

[@ThioJoe]

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.

[@X22GJP]

Completely agree. It's confusing and totally understandable how people feel cheated when they buy a 1 TB drive, believing it to be 1000 GB (or worse, 1024 GB) yet gets reported as 931 GB. Hardly anybody I know has even heard of MiB, TiB etc. At the end of the day, file systems and other nuances aside, as long as the underlying OS reports everything and handles everything consistently, you are still getting "that" amount of storage.

[@wompastompa3692]

1024 is the correct use of the base-2 SI prefixes, Ki and Mi and so forth. What's not right is Windows reporting the base-2 sizes by using the base-10 SI prefixes, K and M and so forth.

[@psychospartan3007]

isnt the reason why you convert units its still misleading

[@NexisPrime]

That excuse works for standard things that are already base 10 like kilometer, kiloliter, etc. Those things were built from scratch to be base 10. That excuse doesn't hold up as well when the thing you're referring to is base 2 by nature. It's not hard to understand that if you're talking about bits and bytes, you're talking about base 2 and thus 1 GB = 1024 MB. It cannot be anything else because of the very nature of what you are counting. Computers are never going to actually use bits in base 10, so displaying them in base 10 is only for the benefit of computer illiterate people and even that is misleading at best. Counting 1000 bytes and saying that is 1 KB while close, is simply a lie. Also, it's not redefining when using those prefixes to mean 1024 if it's in a completely different context. Those prefixes will still be used in base 10 contexts just the same. They're being added to, not "redefined."

[@Lord_Vertice]

@@NexisPrime that's not how it works. The prefixes kilo, mega, giga, etc are defined by us to mean powers of 10. I can take one thousand of literally anything and call it kilo. Kilometer, kilosecond, kilo-apple, kilobyte. It doesn't matter what the thing I'm enumerating is, a thousand of it is a kilo. Likewise, I could call 1024 meters a kibimeter without issue. It'd be weird, sure, but since the prefix kibi is defined as 1024 of something (usually bytes and bits) it's not wrong to use it like that, only unusual. If our society used binary as the primary system, powers of 2 would surely be more common. In base two, 10000000000 meters would be 1 kibimeter, and that'd be the norm. I could also say that 1111101000 meters are 1 kilometer, but similarly to 1024 being weird and unintuitive in base 10, 1000 is weird in base 2. But as you know, we don't use base 2, so that's not the standard way to do it. It's still useful for engineers to use powers of 2, which is specifically why the kibi units exist! But you can't redefine kilo as 1024, that's just simply not true. Use kilo mega giga for bases of 10 and -bi for bases of 2 and literally everyone will be happy. Thus, file sizes for end users should be displayed in powers of 10, like all systems but windows do, or at the very least use the correct label for powers of 2.

[@simcrafter]

Why is this video 1 second shorter than advertised?

[@Sekhmmett]

Because of the fartometer conversion at base 24

[@SuperRandoms.]

Yt thumbnail rounds up but Tim stamp doesn’t

[@EveryThingKungFuVee]

Might be using "gibiseconds"

[@chikalikedis8170]

smart man

[@ajtv_ag]

Sibsconds

[@USN1985dos]

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

[@Shywizz]

what the hell did he use to do ???

[@benjamin9112]

@@Shywizz search ThioJoe how to turn on your PC

[@AmoralTom]

I remember people arguing whether or not he would never be able to turn his troll channel into an informative one.

[@_SJ]

ThioJoe as a KZbinr evolved flawlessly.

[@ALMASHNI-MAN]

@@Shywizz Scroll all the way down on the playlist tab, there's a play list called joke tech video's, there's also another one called ThioJoe's satire videos

[@Sir_pancakes_]

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

[@pousthemoco]

Trolling people with data

[@elfishmoss1457]

Exactly, this why windows is the most popular OS

[@Sir_pancakes_]

@@elfishmoss1457 it's not tho, well it is on desktop but Linux is actually more popular on servers

[@elfishmoss1457]

@@Sir_pancakes_ ah, cool, I just assumed but ig that makes sense, but for PCs I mean anyways, I mostly tend to ignore servers a lot, but fair enough

[@Nedyarg1100]

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...

[@Aaadapro]

Same

[@JFTSwiertz]

Strangely, I've been having an issue with a flashdrive I used for re flashing a computer to Linux (no shh I'm not gonna be that guy) Back into a windows machine, the drive shows it's normal (slightly smaller) amount, but then the remaining amount shows up in a second drive. One is J, one is H, the smaller one has the Linux file system on it. It's such a strange issue.

[@allnighter8762]

Same

[@DEV_Shadow]

its gone because MS decide start use not binary measure. LOL go to Linux and you will see the difference

[@nazierjamie5342]

Same here haha

[@natetheaverage5270]

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.

[@spikef1114]

Where ru studying?

[@natetheaverage5270]

@@spikef1114 If you're wondering what school, this is just a high school class, I'm not in college.

[@justcomments1443]

I would have assume the programming teacher would know about 1kb = 1024 bytes

[@okayokay2104]

You are a cool fellow

[@vgamesx1]

Honestly, it doesn't matter if it's high school or anything else, it's still a little embarrassing for a technical teacher to be missing out basic knowledge like that.

[@ProjectPhysX]

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.

[@xiyax6241]

Great

[@JohnDoe-ip3oq]

That's because RAM has always been binary.

[@StolenJoker84]

It’s the same for system RAM as well. This is only an issue with storage.

[@Sky_Dance20]

Hello I am Building A PC.. I Want Someone To Check Whether My Selected Specs Are Correct OR not.. My Budget is 45K₹ And I Want Medium Gaming And Professional editing PC.. I Am Sharing My Selected Specs I want You To Check My specs And Tell Is These Are Okay Or not for My needs... Processor - Ryzen 5 3600 GPU - RX 580 (10k) Motherboard - Gigabyte B450 Ds3h Wifi Build Crucial 8GB 2 Separate Rams Psu - Ant eSports 500L (500watt) cabinet - ant eSports Ice 311-MT.. Please Let Me Know Is These Specs Are Right Or Not.. I am Eagerly Waiting For Your response.. Thank You For Reading This

[@manarakhs9860]

​​@@Sky_Dance20it seems fine to me but might need to get a bigger psu for future upgrades

[@solandri69]

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.

[@JohnDoe-ip3oq]

Maxtor made better high end drives than every one else though. They were first to ata133, and had superior SATA multitasking. Their cheap drives were bad, but the good ones were better, and when they were bought out all the drive manufacturers lowered quality and performance outside of Toshiba.

[@okIahsam]

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.

[@alexspeed8888]

No, everyone should use the binary units. It's just more profitable for hard drive manufacturers to mislead consumers

[@okIahsam]

@@alexspeed8888 Maybe I should have been more clear. I wasn't referring to whether Microsoft should use binary or decimal. I don't really care either way. The problem is that they show the binary number with the decimal unit label. It's like if I said some distance was 100 yards, but the "100" was actually the number of meters but I just called it yards because I "didn't want to confuse people".

[@Lord_Vertice]

@@okIahsam good way of putting it. The unit used really doesn't matter a lot (bases of 10 are more intuitive for 90% of users though) as long as the label is right.

[@Theophan123]

Halfway through the video I also realized that the blame should be towards Microsoft. Come on, it doesn't take a college semester to teach consumers about binary units of storage

[@ThioJoe]

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: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eqbJhoyjqbuMj7c

[@_SJ]

Rewatching now 👀

[@limcheehean]

Yes I remember watching that video!

[@cyberwolfe]

What's amazing to me is that even though this is an EXTREMELY well done and highly informative video remade from 2014, that people today STILL ask this time old question year after year. 👍🏻

[@KPoWasTaken]

I remember that vid!

[@ilovethismightyfineplace]

I think it’s more that us OG IT guys spent too many decades calling it that way that when the standard was changed in 1998 we just never bothered to change. Just like when we still say BIOS instead of UEFI.

[@_SJ]

"Back then, every Megabyte matter" - YES ✔️

[@ThioJoe]

I was so shook

[@_SJ]

@@ThioJoe Me too 😂

[@_SJ]

@Yontek Nohara Depends on the sense of humor of the person reading the comment.

[@Sufiley]

Happy early Halloween

[@sonario6489]

MLM - Megabyte Lives Matter!

[@derivious2012]

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.

[@CosmicCanvas666]

Are we really going to go to 32k though? There's a limit after which the human eye can't detect additional pixels.

[@derivious2012]

@@CosmicCanvas666 well i would argue it becomes pointless even at 8k, however things like editing, studios and scientific reasons may go there. also theres the wank factor.

[@majorramsey3k]

That's why we should have stuck with 2160p instead of 4K.

[@parlor3115]

"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.

[@player1_fanatic]

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).

[@chiyolate]

And I don't understand why there are 3 variants of sizes either, when I was looking for a new SSD, I had to search 3 times for: 500GB, 512GB, or 480GB.. luckily for 1TB I think they all use the same 1TB or 2TB and so on.

[@K0nomi]

@@chiyolate ive seen drives advertised in thousands of gigabytes rather than terabytes

[@M18_CRYMORE]

@@chiyolate I believe 480 ones are actually bigger, but a part of it is reserved as "RAM" because these drives lack DRAM unlike more expensive SSDs

[@bitelaserkhalif]

And also we haven't seen 160,320,640,750gb ssd anymore. Why?

[@TheTurnipKing]

So yeah, a scam basically. basically no one but no one uses decimal measurements *except* the hard drive industry to make it's products look bigger.

[@Rigged10000]

who tf gave them these cute ass names 💀

[@arsiarskila]

Me.

[@thedarksideofthemoon2]

hi cutie

[@generictoast7678]

@@thedarksideofthemoon2 teeeheeheehee 🤭

[@hurtman1061]

me🖕

[@StewKeto3DPrinting]

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.

[@shazani18]

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

[@kakhak]

lol

[@Sullrosh]

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.

[@jamiegreig9699]

You didn't watch the entire video

[@user-yh8dg3wq6i]

Right.

[@nimamaster6128]

I used to believe the myth that the formatting and file system is the cause you don't get full capacity, and even though i was aware of binary units didn't know they were the reason why. The more you know! Thanks Thio!

[@shadowinthevoid]

That was the real reason floppy disks and older hard drives, it only changed when hard drive manufactures started this con later on

[@philg8556]

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.

[@majorramsey3k]

CD's use 1024 as well. So does RAM. Even to this day.

[@jasons5916]

I think it started when disks and drives were moving into the MB capacity. Kilo (1000x) in SI is denoted by a small k as in kg, but storage capacity was stated in KB with a big K meaning 1024 bytes. But mega and everything after are capital letters, so a MB could be 1,000,000 bytes or 1024 KB. Hard drive manufacturers noticed the ambiguity and used it to pad their stated disk sizes.

[@pyp2205]

If it wasn't for that previous video you made about the Windows Calculator. I wouldn't have known why drives are smaller than they are (at least on Windows, unlike Linux which wouldn't show that it's smaller). Which pretty much explains why I shrunk 105 GB of disk space for a linux installation instead of 100 GB (Now I'm trying to get another 100 GB for more space).

[@sleeping4cat]

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!!

[@Nightcrawler333]

I think corporate greed drove manufacturers to switch to decimal system - they get the same money for lesser capacity. I'm surprised you didn't mention this.

[@Sound_Tech]

Huh, always assumed it was some kind of formatting discrepancy. Though that discrepancy was looking really big when I installed my 4TB NVMe SSD yesterday.

[@lawrencespicher1769]

Try using Linux

[@GameOver-nm2us]

@@lawrencespicher1769No.

[@joizz5932]

@@GameOver-nm2us 🗿

[@Sky_Dance20]

Hello I am Building A PC.. I Want Someone To Check Whether My Selected Specs Are Correct OR not.. My Budget is 45K₹ And I Want Medium Gaming And Professional editing PC.. I Am Sharing My Selected Specs I want You To Check My specs And Tell Is These Are Okay Or not for My needs... Processor - Ryzen 5 3600 GPU - RX 580 (10k) Motherboard - Gigabyte B450 Ds3h Wifi Build Crucial 8GB 2 Separate Rams Psu - Ant eSports 500L (500watt) cabinet - ant eSports Ice 311-MT.. Please Let Me Know Is These Specs Are Right Or Not.. I am Eagerly Waiting For Your response.. Thank You For Reading This

[@yeahnvmnvm1331]

@@Sky_Dance20 watch benchmarking videos

[@sdrtyrtyrtyuty]

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.

[@IskeletuBr]

Thing is, you can't just make a new prefix that none but a very small percentage of users adopt after years of 1024 being the standard and call it a day, calculating storage in powers of 2 makes MUCH more sense than powers of 10, IMHO storage companies using 1000 instead of 1024 is just a nice excuse to sell a cheaper product, since, at some point they all used 1024. I do agree that they should have created new prefixes from the start tho.

[@simplydavemn]

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.

[@cletusthefetus23]

I've known about this for years but I really appreciate you explaining this correctly! Over the years I've seen many complaints from people such as "I lost 35 GB after formatting this drive!" referring to a 500 GB drive. The file system usage is reported as space used, not reducing the capacity. The file table itself will grow as needed. I've seen MFTs grow to gigabytes in size. Reformatting helps.

[@Abcsam86]

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.

[@SaraMorgan-ym6ue]

trust me the capacity thing gets worse with larger drives a 20tb drive shows at 18.1 tb it's crazy

[@NoName_NoTitle]

You skimmed over the netspeed part, but that's another can of worms. For netspeed instead of megabytes and gigabytes they use megabits and gigabits. 1 MB = 8 Mbit. So if you got a 1Gbit internet, your max download speed is actually 125 MB/s...

[@fostena]

I'm a computer scientist, I knew about the kibibyte/kilobyte confusion, but I must say until now I was of the opinion that there was no reason to "switch" to the decimal unit of measurement on Windows. I was so used to call kibibytes "kilobytes". You changed my mind, and that is a rare thing.

[@grshorwich]

The only reason hard disk manufacturers use the decimal units is a marketing reason. It makes their devices look like they have a higher capacity. Everybody used to understand that 1KB = 1024 bytes, 1MB = 1024 KB = 1048576 bytes etc. The binary variants KiB, MiB etc. are something that nobody asked for. *THEY* are the source of the confusion.

[@glenndavies4152]

Actually gigabyte drives were recognized as full gigabytes but then the manufacturers found this new loophole to lower the capacity. This started happening around 1997 or 98 when hard drives were around 5 to 10GB. People started complaining then the manufacturers started letting people know why they are using the new capacity.

[@jmtradacc]

MiB, GiB, TiB... I agree that is ugly and Microsoft don't want to use it. But like you said, they should just show to us in power of 10. Behind the scenes we don't care.

[@LunchThyme]

It's a proper laugh with big drives, because you get to the point where the size doesn't even round up to anymore. A '14TB' drive is actually smaller than 13TB.

[@techie0075]

No, a 14 TB drive actually is 14.00 TB (literally, 14 trillion bytes), which comes out to 12.73 tebibytes, an arbitrary unit of measure that no logical human cares about. But Windows lies and displays the silly 12.7 number with "TB" after it. The rounding error increases as you go higher; it is impossible to rationally reconcile with reality in human terms. That same drive could appear as 13,038 GB; and if you went into Windows Disk Management to partition that drive, all the sudden it would show up as 13,351,440 MB-seems some of that space is coming back, eh? It's all a rounding error; some people are so greedy they think that they are entitled to this fictional space that is simply the byproduct of a rounding error, where some programmer thought it would be cool to bit-shift instead of divide by 1000 to get the correct number. Yeah, I guess it saves a couple CPU cycles...

[@andrewduggan4836]

The IEC didn't invent those units of KiB MiB GiB etc until 1998. Some Orwellian TLA doesn't have the power to force newspeak on the industry. Drive makers were really engaged in lying about capacity because every other segment of the computer industry always used powers of 2.

[@smith4591]

Not only on Windows but I also encounter this issue on hypervisor OSs like Proxmox, where these units actually matter.

[@bengrogan9710]

For the reason they don't change it - my suggestion is that they don't want to risk problems for their business clients. Windows Server OS is based on fundamentally the same OS core - an those businesses running the servers will have their monitoring software set - some will use % thresholds for monitoring others hard values: they don't want that smoke of screwing up a businesses backups and then being sued for consequential losses

[@nuk1964]

Indeed, when it comes with business (and government), you have to be *very* careful, as it would be very likely that data will be exchanged between different systems -- and you'll need to be *very* careful in the usage of the kilo/mega/giga etc. prefixes to make sure all parties (including both the computer systems as well as personnel involved) understand what you mean.

[@rdvqc]

I started in IT in the early 1970's well before the GiB etc notation was introduced around 1998. We would ask vendors "Are those 'marketing MB' or 'real MB'?"

[@eliteknight2137]

Shortly: Manufacturers use decimal system and computers use binar system so when you buy drive advertised as "2TB" in decimal it is 2000000000000 bytes but for every computer bytes are multiplied by 1024 not 1000, so actual size is close to 1,810,000,000,000 bytes. The real question we should ask and resolve is why manufacturers use decimal system and not actual system used by computers? They effectively mislead consumers this way and sell them less for more.

[@MARSHLAND_YT]

This was helpful, about 4 months ago I installed a "1 TB" SSD, but it was 953 GB

[@Bxrben_Dr1p]

953 is a fuckton of storage, i could never with my “57.6gb” hard drive 😢

[@nouton7432]

my 60gb ssd show 55.8gb want them to show what you can use instead of what you pay for

[@YoutubeChannel-in9qd]

Wait what

[@exodia_right_leg]

@@Bxrben_Dr1p Damn I’m running on empty with “2 TB”

[@Kev4Kev]

Why not just add a few more GB of storage to acommodate this? It would be a excellent marketing point for a brand instead of having 1TB inside of the drive maybe have it as 1.05TB, 1.1TB, 1.2 TB or whatever amount would get to 1TB shown on storage regardless of the OS and saying we have 1 TB on our drives no matter what OS you use.

[@ThioJoe]

It would probably just complicate things

[@_SJ]

@@ThioJoe I totally agree 👍🏻

[@Kev4Kev]

@@ThioJoe Probably true but it would bring this to the attention of everyone and probably get all OS makers to fix the issue in their OS's

It would probably dramatically increase the manufacturing cost of the HDDs and SSDs, since their manufacturing is preatty streamlined. Adding a single chip more to an SSD would reqire to completely redesign the PCB and probably also reprogramm the controller.

[@Melechtna]

@@Kev4Kev except no it wouldn't, that's like saying metric should compensate for the weird imperial shit Americans use. Windows is the weirdo holding out, and ram which actually has a reason to. Windows should stop demanding compensation, when it continues to be the problem.

[@Cold_Ham_on_Rye]

I had always assumed this was like manufacturing tolerance or something. Lol shows how much I understand electronic hardware. Standards never seem to actually become standard half the time. Lookin at you USB.

[@michaelwarren2391]

From reading the comments, I see that Chen's comment from 2009 mostly holds true - the majority of people don't know or don't use the Ki/Mi/Ti units.

[@_SJ]

I'm glad you made a follow-up video about Tebibytes. Thank you 👍🏻🙂

[@zachlausman9524]

I remember when hard drives makers changed from using the binary size labeled on the box to using the decimal size in the early to mid 90's . Happen when consumer drives where getting into the hundreds of millions of bytes. So 40 MB drive was really 40 MiB , and my 200 MB was really 200 MB. Also allowed the makers to advertise larger appearing drives. As for the whole MB vs MiB , the MiB wasn't really a term until the later nineties. I think it was proposed around 1995, but would have to look. So 1.44 MiB floppies were labled 1.44 MB because MiB term didn't exist when they came about. As for Windows and File Explorer, yeah Windows predates the terms, but so does Linux and MacOS. So they should either change the label or the display math. As for me, I prefer computer size show in TiB , because computers are base2, and I just naturally think that way about them. I like everything else in Base10, since I think about most others things that way. 🙂

[@pseudonym3690]

Good memory! The SI units were introduced in 1998, but weren't really of any relevance until like 10 years later. I think my first 1GB drive really had 1GB as well, but can't be sure about that any more. A 1,44 MB Floppy had only 1,37 MiB though. I remember vividly when I tried to copy 1,4MB of data onto one and Windows telling me it doesn't fit despite the fact that the floppy claimed otherwise.

[@H1pok0ndr1ak]

because I mess around with Linux, Windows, Rasbian, and MacOS, I was already aware of the difference between the two ways of measurement. you have just clarified the issue in a way that is easy to understand

[@larandi]

30 years ago at school an IT teacher told me one KB is 1024 Bytes, one MB is always 1024 KB, one GB is always 1024 MB and etc. Who said it wrong didn`t make an exam. After few decades hard drive producers decided at own will it will be via SI prefixes because of marketing, a higher capacity looks better. Other drive producers had to follow the first one, who made this marketing step.

[@ThioJoe]

Or you know, the computer science academics decided to change the meaning of 200 year old prefixes

[@channel-uz9fz]

I'm a linux user and I find it really nice to actually see everything in correct units when I want them to be

[@aetheralmeowstic2392]

Same

[@dustojnikhummer]

Well it's still not since the physical drive is mislabeled. Microsoft is showing the correct unit, but the wrong label

[@shayan9571]

Who really cares

[@dustojnikhummer]

@@shayan9571 I do.

[@pseudonym3690]

@@dustojnikhummer Microsoft is showing the units that all computer guys have used for decades, just as basically all Linux distros did until around 2010 ish. The change is still fairly recent and Chen's opinion still holds up. What you consider wrong, I consider correct and I hope they keep it that way for a long time to come.

[@TheRealScottMusic]

so a Pebibyte exists

[@pyp2205]

pretty much yeah

[@fancydoggy]

@Yontek Nohara How can we tell him?

[@LazyJesse]

@@fancydoggy just spit it out instead of beating around the bush

[@fancydoggy]

@@LazyJesse Can't say that on youtube, sorry.

[@fancydoggy]

@Astral i dunno man

[@ArupDnath]

I bought a 512GB SSD and it was only showing 487GB😡, but when I checked it in task manager, it was showing 512GB😇.

[@petterlerdahl1193]

I always thought it could vary from what system you installed. So lost size had gone into partitions and such. But nice to know the real reason now.

[@vladislavkaras491]

I already knew more or less about it, but not that detailed. Thank you for the video!

[@toehser]

You didn't mention that it is in manufacturers interest when competing with each other to say a larger number relative to the money they spend building a device, so they started building to the decimal while claiming the binary mostly similar to selling slightly smaller than a quart of ice cream alongside quarts of ice cream in the freezer.

[@johncate9541]

Exactly. It was basically a scam to inflate the size of the drive capacity, and they got the standards body to redefine the units so they couldn't be sued for misrepresentation.

[@peterpan408]

MMF.

[@CrunchyCerealLover]

Conclusion: Companies didn't lie

[@SaraMorgan-ym6ue]

if you think a 1tb drive it shows at 931 gb if it's a 20tb drive it shows as 18tb yeah the size thing gets even smaller with large drives like that dude

[@jimfcarroll]

You would have LITERALLY failed my CS 101 class with this description. The "definition" of a Kilobyte is 1024. It always has been regardless of the name.

[@joemann7971]

That just means the taught you wrong in your CS101 class. A quick google search confirms he is correct.

[@joemann7971]

Hes also referring to a standard. Classes can define how they refer to different units in their class. So, even though your class is technically wrong, you should follow their definition for that class. I was also taught that KB was 1024. Its important to understand the difference and even though the say kilobyte, they mean kibibyte. A true kilobyte is 1000, because kilo is from the metric system. Im pretty sure the metric system will fight you if you say kilo means 1024. IMO, calling it a kibibyte makes more sense.

[@jimfcarroll]

@@joemann7971 Nope. He even mentions the history and then ignores it. 1 Kilobyte = 1024 bytes

[@thedrunkenrebel]

My IT teacher back in highschool taught a theory about those reserved partitions being used in the defrag process as an intermediate storage of data being permanently written and erased as the drive would reorder information. That was obviously not the case but still a cite conspiracy theory about how windows stole ~100mb of disk space

[@mkatakm]

Anyway, short answer is, Microsoft and RAM manufacturers are not doing this deliberately, they are simply true to the spirit. It is HD manufacturers to blame simply because they want their capacities look more than they actually are. They are the greedy ones trying to deceive their customers.

[@nHans]

Even "back then", it was only Americans who unquestioningly accepted that 1 KB = 1,024 bytes, 1 MB = 1,024^2 bytes and so on. For the rest of us-who used the metric system everyday-it was very irritating to be told that when referring to bytes, the SI powers-of-1,000 prefixes _k, M, G_ etc. were to be reinterpreted as powers-of-1,024. Except when referring to storage media. Aaargh!!! 😡 American companies-never metric-friendly to begin with-saw the SI prefixes as customizable placeholders, rather than the rigid standard and powers of 1,000 that they actually are. Not surprisingly, they "repurposed" them as powers of 1,024-because that was easier than inventing new prefixes. We knew it would cause a lot of unnecessary confusion-and it did. Still does. But we grudgingly went along with them anyway. We didn't have a choice. After all, they pretty much created the IT industry from scratch. Oh, and the *'k'* is to be written in lowercase: *kB,* not *KB.* Uppercase 'K' is acceptable in newspaper headlines, section headings, and other contexts where all-cap text is used. But it still means 1,000. Never 1,024.

[@xamtra]

Before this video, I had gone through a few blogs, and KZbin videos in the past where they say entirely different things about this less storage dilemma. I'm in shock now. I need some time and research to digest this. Thanks to those who gave the wrong information before with a straight face 🤬. Thanks to you.

[@akirosensei]

0:38 It's not a thousand!

[@aicovermakerdude]

Short explanation: It's Microsoft's Windows fault

[@LukasDzunko]

The main reason is disk manufactures ... initially everything on computer was 2^10, but disk manufactures realized that by using 10^3 they can sell smaller drives with same label. That's why this nonsense started. Later on some people try to fix this with "i" units instead of forcing manufactures to properly show disk sizes ... btw. If you check same "size" disks from various manufactures then you will find that they don't have same size in bytes. I mean raw capacity, not capacity displayed by file-system. Due to that is not possible to use full size of disk in raid setup. If disk needs to be replaced with different model / vendor then it may be few hundreds MB smaller and raid will not accept it ... and that's only because disks are not properly aligned to size, so vendors can save small percentage on each disk ...

[@wChris_]

Here is the actualy reason drive capacity is actually lower: Because then manufactures would actually have to put more bits into drives! There isnt even a reason for basing capacity of base 10 as all addressing is done in binary anyway (this includes your storage).

[@gamingthunder6305]

i have to disagree and yes i might be wrong. but 1MB was and is 1024. not 1000. the HDD manufacturers just decided to use 1000 for 1 MB for marketing reasons. they even specified it on there boxes back then in the 80s wile everybody else used 1024 byes which makes sense. as you stated its to the power of 2. so why would we all of a sudden need MiB. this MiB thing seems to me to be more of a fixing a problem somebody else introduced.

[@Plasmacore_V]

This exactly. They made 'new' units then made the 'new' ones the old ones and the old ones the new ones. It's confusing and pointless.

[@Sevicify]

You are wrong. Kilo was defined and in use by the metric system for decimal numbers since 1795 and mega since 1873, and these prefixes were further standardised by the International System of Units who added giga and tera in 1960. Computer manufacturers merely co-opted these prefixes with some twisting their meaning to binary numbers, but many used them for decimal numbers and some early computer systems actually used decimal addressing systems. The prefixes have always been used for decimal clock frequencies since 1930s and for data rates from the 50s well before any use for binary numbers which didn't start until the late 50s/early 60s for data sizes and even then they commonly used them for decimal data sizes as well giving it a dual meaning. So the dual usage started in the 60s, and drive manufacturers simply decided to stick with the decimal meaning which makes a lot more sense given the metric history of the prefixes. The need for these 'i' binary prefixes was very real to deal with the confusion and inconsistency they started back then when they pilfered the metric prefixes with a twisted meaning, they should have had their own different prefixes from the start.

[@chiyolate]

I remember your old video about this! and since then, I respect software developers that put proper binary units in it, I believe japanese softwares tend to use them (KiB, MiB) instead of KB or MB.

[@seancondon5572]

What really grinds my gears is that some drives - like this sandisk USB flash drive I have - will advertise 32GB... and when I pull it up in fdisk ... not 32,000,000,000. No. 30,765,219,840 ... these clowns aren't even giving the capacity they advertise.

[@crazyqqq3]

the original standard was GB and those in the industry knows this and knows how to convert up or down. However, the harddisk manufacturers wanted to "lie" about the actual disk space and purposely used terms like 100 MB to denote the disk space when in reality the space is smaller than 100MB. That is why almost everything from ram size, unix measurement, bandwidth, Windows XP measurement are "consistent" with MB and GB.... while only harddisks are always short in its measurement.

[@Vladimir_Kv]

Now please, explain, why many manufacturers (for example, Apacer or Crucial) have both 512 GB and 480 GB drives in their line-ups.

[@rollschuh2282]

i already knew about the power of 2 system bc pretty much every game does that by using textures in a power of 2 resolution. but was interesting to hear about the behind the scenes stuff

[@Rex_Nichts]

It's on the "base 2" and "base 10", not power of, because that refers to the exponent, the little cutesy little number, not the integer, the big burly chonky number. I got a bit confused because the binary had the power of 10's, while the decimals had some irregular powers of.

[@neilvanrooyen7196]

Starting Computer programming from the age of 13, around 1988/89 on my ZX Spectrum, my Friends Commodore VIC-20 and eventually the Commodore 64 at school, and spending the rest of my years in IT, doing Electronics, my MCSE and 3 Years Computer Science, plus learning Logic Systems and Logic Gates, I've pretty much always known the reason for the so called "discrepancy" and have always accepted it due to understanding the variation in measurement. Not the abbreviations for KiB, MiB, etc, though. I knew them before but forgot as it's very rarely used as you have mentioned. So these slight differences have never bothered me, but you explained it very well for those that don't know. I would like to maybe suggest delving into the way it is calculated by going into how Binary works to help expand on the numbering methodology.

[@McVincient]

Amazing video!! This was a question in my mind for years! 😂

[@newmonengineering]

Unfortunately, and fortunately I began computers with VIC 20 and the Texis instruments days. So I already know about these things. That said I also agree they could change them on either the label of the device or in windows like you mentioned. However, now that it has been this way for soo long, it might cause confusion for the old timers at this point lol. I think it would be a welcomed change, but getting a company to change something that isn't broken to begin with is a hard sell to any company that values profit.

[@Hydra360ci]

Be like HP rating at the Engine versus the Wheels... Advertisers sport the Engine HP, number... cause it's always the bigger number.

[@Lord_Vertice]

Have you seen windows 11? Microsoft sure as hell doesn't give a shit about not changing stuff for the sake of consistency, so a minor change like this surely wouldn't matter that much.

[@shadowinthevoid]

Nobody used these new decimal versions until hard drive manufacturers started this con. Sad to see people going along with this.

[@njabuloxulu1239]

Finally about time someone talks about this.

[@Voreoptera]

Thank you for finally addressing this. This really needs to be known. I think Microsoft should only change the unit they are using to be more accurate. That would be the fastest fix.

[@thorbjrnhellehaven5766]

I think Microsoft should keep the unit they display, but just display the correct value with that unit, and add an option to switch to base2 unit.

[@Voreoptera]

@@thorbjrnhellehaven5766 End users are going to handle a unit change far better then a number change.

[@bltzcstrnx]

@@Voreoptera that is what called a breaking change. This means major behavior changes that can effect a lot of software.

[@freevbucks8019]

TLDR: They actually are almost the exact size, if not more. Problem is that windows calculates it in GiB and displays as GB. Whoops. Also, filesystem overhead can take some of your space.

[@Obsidian8R]

i just assumed that the extra space was used up by programs that would enable connectivity and such or operating systems and UI stuff so the drive could be used,and that also wasnt shown so it could not accidentally be deleted when resetting the drive so that they could still function

[@muqsit81]

Just bought my first laptop last week . Was wondering the exact same question and this video came on my home page . Awesome video. Thank you

[@yumri4]

Most likely consistency is the reason why Windows doesn't change how it counts from base 2 to base 10. You also have switching to base 10 will break so much business software that reads the amount of storage space on the data server drives, software that reads the amount of storage space in the local system drive(s), software that changes how it works depending on how much of the drive is taken up, teired storage solutions, etc. with storage software. Windows changing how it works with storage will be bad. You also have change is bad when the current version already works perfectly.

[@ThioJoe]

Right, that’s why I said they could just make the change for Windows explorer which is the main place it matters anyway

[@witchofengineering]

They could change the way it's displayed in Windows Explorer, without actually changing APIs and such. And most of those software read a raw number of bytes and then convert them to other units internally.

[@oginer]

It won't break anything. This is only about how the number is displayer to the user, it doesn't change any internal (some linux distros even have this a a setting: you can configure it to use binary or decimal units). All Windows API calls that work with data sizes use bytes. It's the software that convert those bytes to other units for displaying.

[@yumri4]

@@oginer yeah i got that from the above comments

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Speaking of “consistency”, here’s a trivia question: HD floppies were commonly referred to as having a capacity of “1.44MB”. What meaning of “MB” gives us such a number?

[@Kelly--]

0:03 no wonder she's upset. i had the same thing happen and i returned my 931, and they replaced it with a 1024gb as should be... lol

[@Vikike_sr71]

This guy literally had the biggest 180 in youtube history, bro went from „How to play PS4 games on Xbox with CD“ to this, GG

[@avilio7015]

respect to the guy who came up with "zebi" name unit idea , 3:18 , large and big as always should be

[@knight55x]

Ifykyk

[@Clownin-round]

Thank you for explaining this! I'm bad at explaining things and it's difficult to tell my friend that there's two versions of GB

[@dmv.paul09]

You might have asd

[@TazerXI]

Although I think they should update it, you somewhat answered your own question. If nobody would care/notice the space their files take up if converted from MiB toi MB, although corrected, why would Microsoft spend time developing something that users wouldn't notice.

[@Zuriki09]

There was one other thing that could reduce available space, reserved redundancy blocks. Quite common for SSDs to use reserved blocks to swap out bad or failing blocks for good ones silently in the background.

[@Wesley_H]

So how hard is it really for storage manufacturers to mark both unit on their packaging? Some go so far as a fine print warning that “formatted storage capacity may vary”. Can’t they just as easily give the actual amount in GiB?

[@michaelthompson9798]

I had seen this “i” reference in drive capacities and thought there must be a different way of how the calculate bits/bytes etc …. I didn’t realise it was to do with the binary aspect despite knowing about binary only using 1’s and 0’s 🤦‍♂🤦‍♀😆. Great video and very informative ThioJoe 🥰😇🤯👍! Great video once again and very well explained for us common folk 🤣😂

[@birdpump]

In enterprise server software, almost everything is measured in tebibytes, especially memory

[@KeinNiemand]

But does it say TiB or does it incorectly say TB?

[@birdpump]

@@KeinNiemand allways written in TiB

[@adamtajhassam9188]

Thank you 4 the clarity . I have a theory- MS is sticking to the current labeling for 2 reasons: 1) People are used to the format 2) Simplicity of code.

[@KeinNiemand]

@@marvinmallette6795 so then only change it in explorer and keep it the ssme in the command promt, maybe add a parameter to get the real units.

[@angeldude101]

"/ 1024" sure is a lot simpler code than "/ 1000"...

[@NukaPeter]

Finally watched a video again after a few years, I'm confused why this is factual and informative

[@yousefslimani99]

Yeah me too I was wondering why the drives doesn't have their actual memory capacity?! They just remove 7 or 8% of the memory capacity!!

[@jedsiecz]

This video in a shortcut: Windows is using mebibits as megabytes (it messes up with the units) or you might have some extra partitions.

[@RubyColoredDiamond]

Thank you for talking about this, really helps me with my Trade School IT class.

[@altonlynch5464]

I've been working on computers for over 30 years but I always learn a little more when I watch your videos. My experience goes back to dos.

[@themrunknown850]

Oh and can you cover about the -bit stufix unit too? Like there are Gigabyte, now Gibibyte and I heard about Gigabit too. What's the different?

[@SIeipner]

1 byte is 8 bits. So you just multiply/divide by 8 to convert between them

[@fromfareast3070]

1 byte is 8 bit

[@ThioJoe]

Yea you just divide or multiply by 8 to go between them, that one's a lot simpler

[@the-Gammaron]

Wouldn't some older programs display the "old" number? I think that would just confuse people since the file explorer would display a completely different number from the program's number.

Well, it is better for old 10+ year old programms to display a difference in file size than for anything newer, which is what 99.9% of all people use anyways. I mean, the vast majority of people running the latest windows updates will use almost exclusively newer software or software that is still being patched rarely. People running super old software likely won't use Windows 11+ anyways, so it wouldn't matter to them .

[@the-Gammaron]

@ The first point makes sense and I agree with it, but... I'm pretty sure that there are some professionals who use Windows 11 *and* also some very old programs.

[@the-Gammaron]

@ And yes, they probably would know why is there an inconsistency, and how to deal with it, but it would still be inconvenient.

​@@the-Gammaron Professional software is usually updated. In a professional enviroment, if one somehow needs to do a task that has not been picked up by any other software so far, it will almost certainly not run on Windows 11 due to the incompatibility anyway. If the software is in any way important, they will not run it on Windows 11 but on a, for this software stable enviroment. Besides, any company that is dependent on such old software pays Microsoft money to continue the support for their old software and old operating system. And even if one uses for some reayon, an such old software on a modern operating system with the newest patches, why would it matter so much if their file sizes would display a slightly different number in Widnows than in their very old software? It wouldn't even be important considering the softwares task in corelation to it's age. Would it be better if millions to billions of people would't have to deal with this problem or would it be better if a few hundreds to thousands of people wouldn't have to deal with it. People which are likely experienced enough that they won't care anyways? It simply makes no sense at all from any perspective to not change it. The only reason why it hasn't been done is because too little people cared enough to comment on it. It is a problem that takes a little bit of time if one encounters it. Complaining about it takes much more time thn dealing with it once. But if millions of people deal with it from time to time, it adds up.

[@techie0075]

I would rather new software display the correct number and be occasionally reminded of the wrong number in old software, than to continue in error just to "tow the line" and pretend that nothing is amiss. Plenty of people can see that something isn't right when their brand new drive shows up as smaller than it really is. As capacities increase, this discrepancy will only also increase, until it is corrected. Things have always added up correctly when using the right math...

[@flufo]

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 :)

[@cfehunter]

The common meaning in computing is the power of 2 variants. Regardless of any reasoning the manufacturers may have had, it quite clearly works in their favor and not in the customers, and this is only going to get worse as drives get larger. It's misleading labeling at best.