I know this a a joke but in case some people are actually curious: The manufacturer gives the capacity in Terabytes (= 1 Trillion Bytes) and the operating system probably shows it in Tebibytes (1024^4 Bytes ≈ 1.1 Trillion Bytes). So 2 Terabytes are two trillion bytes which is approximately 1.82 Tebibytes
They could easily use the proper units, but sometime someone decided to cheat and now everyone does to the point that this is the standard now.
Before mibi-, gibi-, tibibytes, etc. were a thing, it was the harddrive manufacturers who were creating a little. Everyone saw a kilobyte as 1024 bytes but the storage manufacturers used the SI definition of kilo=1000 to their advantage.
By now, however, kibibytes being 1024 bytes and kilobytes being 1000 bytes is pretty much standard, that most agree on. One notable exception is of course Windows…
Indeed, Windows could easily stop mislabeling TiB as TB, but it seems it's too hard for them.
The IEC changing the definition of 1KB from 1024 bytes to 1000 bytes was a terrible idea that's given us this whole mess. Sure, it's nice and consistent with scientific prefix now... except it's far from consistent in actual usage. So many things still consider it binary prefix following the JEDEC standard. Like KiB that's always 1024 bytes, I really think they should've introduced another new unambiguous unit eg. KoB that's always 1000 bytes and deprecated the poorly defined KB altogether
M stands for Mega, a SI prefix that existed longer than the computer data that is being labeled. MB being 1000000 bytes was always the correct definition, it's just that someone decided that they could somehow change it.
You're missing a huge part of the reason why the term 'tebibytes' even exists.
Back in the 90s, when USB sticks were just coming out, a megabyte was still 1024 kilobytes. Companies saw the market get saturated with drives but they were still expensive and we hadn't fully figured out how to miniaturize them.
So some CEO got the bright idea of changing the definition of a "megabyte" to mean 1000. That way they could say that their drive had more megabytes than their competitors. "It's just 24 kilobytes. Who's going to notice?"
Nerds.
They stormed various boards to complain but because the average user didn't care, sales went through the roof and soon the entire storage industry changed. Shortly after that, they started cutting costs to actually make smaller sized drives but calling them by their original size, ie. 64MB* (64 MB is 64000).
The people who actually cared had to invent the term "mebibyte" purely because of some CEO wanting to make money. And today we have a standard that only serves to confuse people who actually care that their 2TB is actually 2048 GiB or 1.8 TiB.
Dude, a "1.44MB" floppy disk was 1.38MiB once formatted (1,474,560 B raw). It's been going on for eternity.
It's inconsistent across time though. 700MB on a CD-R was MiB, but a 4.7GB DVD was not.
RAM has always, without exception, been reported in 1024 B per KB. Inversely, network bandwidth has been 1000 B per KB for every application since the dialup days (and prior).
That's just wrong. "Kilo" is ancient Greek for "thousand". It always meant 1000. Because bytes are grouped on powers of two and because of the pure coincidence that 10^3 (1000) is almost the same size as 2^10 (1024) people colloquially said kilobyte when they meant 1024 bytes, but that was always wrong.
Update: To make it even clearer. Try to think what historical would have happened if instead of binary, most computers would use ternary. Nobody would even think about reusing kilo for 3^6 (=729) or 3^7 (=2187) because they are not even close.
Resuing well established prefixes like kilo was always a stupid idea.
Or - you know - for consistency? In physics kilo, mega etc. are always 10^(3n), but then for some bizarre reason, unit of information uses the same prefixes, but as 2^(10n).
The result of marketing pushing base 10 numbers on an archiecture that is base 2. Fundamentally is caused by the difference of 10³ (1000) vs 2¹⁰ (1024).
Actual storage size of what you will buy is Amount = initial size * (1000/1024)^n where n is the power of 10^n for the magnitude (e.g kilo = 3, mega = 6, giga = 9, tera = 12)
Fact: This truth is intentionally manipulation.
OP is right with an applicable staturing the pic.
Solution: Sue the fuck out of all of them. Especially Samsung. Fuck Samsung everything.
its correct, the final size you see in the OS is not kilo/giga/terabytes but kibi/gibi/tebibytes. the problem is less of the drive and more of how the OS displays the value. the OS CHOOSES to display it in base 2, but drives are sold in base 10, and what is given is actually correct. Windows, being the most used one, is the most guilty of starting the trend of naming what should be kibi/gibi/tebibytes as kilo/giga/terabytes. Essentially, 2 Tera Bytes ~= 1.82 Tebibytes. many OS' display the latter but use the former naming
Also minus metadata overhead.
Yup, damn formatting also gonna take a chunk
Image Transcription: Meme
I bought a new 2Tb SSD but it shows up as 1.8TB SSD
[An image of a classical art piece. The man in the image is wearing a hat and has a peculiar facial expression. One of his arms is on a table, palm facing up. The other arm is in the air, with the pointer finger touching the palm. Near that hand is the caption "Where's my 0.2TB"]
Instead of that we should protest against si k should be K
Imposter
(Since this is SI it's powers of 10^3 not 2^10 when going one level up)
I'd be thrilled if the SSD I bought ended up being almost 8x larger than advertised! Does beg the question of why you're buying 250GB SSDs in 2023 but I'm not here to judge.
Funnily enough, the meme still works. They wanted 0.2 TB, goddammit, not some hugely oversized 1.8 TB hard drive.
That's for the magic numbers that hold the 1.8 TB together. They live in that 0.2 TB and if you kill them then the 1.8 TB fly apart at the speed of light.
It's 2 TB, not 2 TiB. One is to the base of 10, the other to the base of 2.
Taxes
government filling up a secret section of every factory-fresh hard drive with CSM and terrorist material in case they ever want to lock you away
Imagine buying 14TB and find out that it is 12TB instead.
I've always known the advertised space is larger than the actual space, but it was never quite the shock as it was when I recently bought an 18TB external drive with ~16 TB usable.
Yah this bugs me so much!! On top of that how dare system OS take up so much space?
I just delete that so there's more room for my stuff.
I need more space for memes. This bulky System32 folder is in the way.
The issue is in your software that displays the capacity (most likely windows).
You bought 2 TB SSD. You got 2 TB SSD. This is equivalent to 1.8 TiB (think of it like yards and meter). Windows shows you the capacity in TiB, but writes TB next to it.
Say you buy a 2.18 yard stick. You get a 2.2 yard stick, which is equivalent to 2 meter. Windows will tell you it's 2 yards long. Why? I don't know.
in small print 2TiB*
From wikipedia:
More than one system exists to define unit multiples based on the byte. Some systems are based on powers of 10, following the International System of Units (SI), which defines for example the prefix kilo as 1000 (103); other systems are based on powers of 2.
Your system calculates 1 terabyte as 1 tebibyte which is 2^40 bytes=1,099,511,627,776 bytes and the hardware manufacturers calculate 1 terabyte as 1 terabyte which is 10^12=1,000,000,000,000 bytes. That is where the discrepancy is.
200 GB thats nearly CoD Warzone
Which is nothing compared to what ARC survival wants. Games are ridiculous these days. I'm not giving up 1/10th of my storage for a fucking game.
They've been doing this for literally centuries.
I think it started out with a rare case of honest advertising. So for example 720K floppies were advertised as 720K. But then some ~~lying bastard~~ clever marketer decided to start advertising their 720K floppies as 1MB floppies, sometimes but not always marked "unformatted capacity".
And of course this had the desired effect of making people buy their disks instead of the honestly marketed ones, because people didn't read the small print and thought they were getting more storage, which was important before CDs were a thing and software distributions were starting to need multiple disks. So everyone had to start doing it.
This is as far back as my memory of the practice goes, so it may have started before 720K floppies were mainstream, but that's why disk manufacturers now advertise the unformatted capacity of their drives instead of the formatted, aka usable, capacity.
This is where garderobe manufacturers are technically right, but theyre still dicks by (ab)using the fuck out of it.
TB = factors of 1000 which humans use, TiB is factors of 1024, which computers use.
Yes yes, they have it correct, it's 2TB but you're selling less than expected and you fucking know it.
Then there is also the filesystem that takes a small required cut to store your files nicely but that is almost negligible
Like many have already said, there is a difference in units when talking about actual storage and the storage on the label.
I feel like some marketing team made the changes, because it is technically correct and "easier for normal people to understand"... But that makes it confusing when normal people plug it in so, that team should be thrown overboard.
Edit: easier not earlier
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