Subscribe Via Email
How to Use Google Calculator to Find the Real Size of Your Hard Drive
So you just bought a shiny new hard drive and after you turn on your computer, you notice that your 500 GB hard drive only shows up as 465 GB… If you’re wondering what’s going on, you’re not alone.
Hard drive manufacturers say that 1000 bytes equal a kilobyte, and 1000 kilobytes equal a megabyte, and so on. However, computers think in binary terms. A computer says that 1024 bytes equal a kilobyte and 1024 kilobytes equal a megabyte and so on.
This difference in counting hard drive storage really starts to make your hard drive look a lot smaller than you thought it was. The hard drive manufacturers want to advertise their hard drives to be as big as they can, so it doesn’t look like this discrepancy in what constitutes a kilobyte, etc. will change soon.
However, you can use Google to easily find out how much hard drive space you will really have when you buy a new hard drive.
I will show you how this is done in Gigabytes first, since that is the most common unit of hard drive measurement at the current time.
All you have to do is type the following into a Google search box:
[advertised hard drive size]e9 bytes in gigabytes
So an example would be 100e9 bytes in gigabytes. This example touches me personally — when I bought a new laptop a few years ago, I purchased it with a 100 GB hard drive. When I booted it up, I noticed that it was only about 93 GB. I felt jipped. However, you can see from the screen shot below that the hard drive was holding exactly as much as it should have.
At least with the 100 GB hard drive I was only missing just under seven gigabytes. However, if you were to purchase a 750 GB hard drive, you will notice that there are over 50 gigabytes missing in action.
What if My Hard Drive is Measured in Terabytes?
In order to use this feature for hard drives that are measured in terabytes, you need to change the e9 to e12. You want it to look like the example below.
As you can see, if you buy a 1.2 TB hard drive, Windows will only show that you have a 1.09 TB hard drive.
If you thought this was bad, wait until we advance to the days where hard drives are measured in yottabytes! If hard drive makers don’t change how they measure their hard drive sizes, a 100 YB hard drive will only store just over 80% of what you think it should store!
If you’re curious, we probably won’t hit that day in a very, very long time. We still have to plow through some other units of storage. Here’s the breakdown:
- 8 Bits equal 1 Byte
- 1024 Bytes equal 1 Kilobyte - KB
- 1024 Kilobytes equal 1 Megabyte - MB
- 1024 Megabytes equal 1 Gigabyte - GB
- 1024 Gigabytes equal 1 Terabyte - TB
- 1024 Terabytes equal 1 Petabyte - PB
- 1024 Petabytes equal 1 Exabyte - EB
- 1024 Exabytes equal 1 Zettabyte - ZB
- 1024 Zettabytes equal 1 Yottabyte - YB
- 1024 Yottabytes equal… Undetermined
According to this white paper (PDF file - opens in new window) by the international data corporation, all of the hard drives in the world combined are projected to hold about 1 Zettabyte in the year 2010.
Comments
Leave a Reply
Poll: Favorite Search Engine
Loading ...