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The Reason Hard Drive is Smaller Than the Label

posted by Bram P

Hard drive smaller

In this lesson, I want to give you a regular language explanation of a basic computer concept which is confusing to people a lot. I will explain two computer terms, that are format and erase, you might find helpful. Both of the terms fundamentally are synonymous, therefore you’re able to use them interchangeably.

A computer hard drive is the part of the computer which actually stores everything, your documents, pictures, music and the critical system files of your computer. Most of the time, everything that’s saved on a PC is going to be kept in the computer hard drive.

Computer Hard drives have been measured for many years in gigabytes and are now well on their way into the terabyte range, which is one order of magnitude up from a gigabyte. A byte is pretty much the smallest unit of measurement when you’re talking about computers (technically, a bit is the one thing smaller than a byte).  A kilobyte is approximately 1,000 bytes. A mega byte is approximately 1,000,000 bytes and Terra byte is 1,000 mega byte.

So say you want to find out how big your computer hard drive is. If you’re on a Mac, you can do this by clicking once on the drive icon, then go to the File menu and then go to “Get Info.” That’ll give you a window that lists the capacity of the drive. When using Windows, you double-click the Computer icon and click on the drive once. It will usually say how big the drive is on the left side of the window.

If you’re not sure how this works, I suggest Windows XP how to or Apple how to training, but specifically video lessons so you can watch the steps and learn. Once you see how big the drive is, you’ll find it’s smaller than you think.

This is because of what happens when you set up the drive for use. “Formatting” or “Erasing” is preparing the drive ready for use. When a person partition and format a computer hard drive, or erasing it, whichever term works for you, what you’re doing is basically building the walls. You begin with the house pad, and then you build the walls and the roof and you make it ready for use. You have some of the space taken up by the walls. Until you do that, a person can’t live in it.

So if you think of erasing or formatting a drive, that is, preparing it to be used, as being like building a house on top of a foundation, you might already have an idea why a computer hard drive’s size ends up seeming to be smaller.

Basically speaking, that’s what happens when you erase a disk. It gets partitioned and formatted and ready to use. In that process, it loses a little bit of that space. You may find it’s an easy way to think about it, and it helps people understand.

I hope that clears up a little bit of a mystery. A lot of my clients have asked about it — this is how I explain it to them, and it seems to make sense to them. I hope that makes sense for you, too.

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