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Essay On Free Space On Computers

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Free space on the computer versus free space on the box

You've just purchased a new computer with 1 TB of hard-drive storage, or perhaps a shiny new 120 GB SSD to speed up your computer's startup time. When you go to move your old files to your new drive, you're consumed by rage, believing yourself to have overpaid for a drive worth several Gigabytes less than what you spent. Ok, maybe not consumed by rage, but you are confused as to why your 1 TB hard-drive is only showing 931 GB, or why your 120 GB SSD is showing only 111 GB.

Why?

All Mac and Windows computers will display the total initial disk space of a drive as less than what is advertised by the drive manufacturer. While drive manufacturers are not lying to you, they are being …show more content…

Larger values

As mentioned earlier, 1 KB would ordinarily be equal to 1000 Bytes and so on (because of the metric system). However, since computers use base 2 to do their math, and 2^10 is equal to 1024, the computer takes the value of 1024 bytes instead of 1000.

But does this mean that digital storage units such as the Kilobyte can be either 1000 or 1024 Bytes? Well... no. Engineers use Kilobytes, Megabytes, Gigabytes, etc, to make life easier. The computer uses Kibibytes, Mebibytes, Gibibytes, etc. The "bi" prefix is the binary version of our normal metric values.

So, the computer sees:

1KiB = 1024 Bytes

1 MiB = 1024 KB’s

1GiB = 1024 MB’s

etc…

The computer does not use KB, MB, GB, or any other base 10 storage value of the metric system.

My computers drive capacity is listed in Gigabytes?

There is one huge problem with Kibibytes, Mebibytes, Gibibytes, and any other binary-friendly amount of bytes. No one in the tech industry (to a certain extent) actually uses "bibytes".

Just take a look at your favorite drive.

This drive, for example, is 1 Terabyte. It will never be less than 1 Terabyte, 1000 Gigabytes, or 1000000 Megabytes. But what does the computer say? The computer says that this 1 TB drive is 930GB. Is it? No... It's 930 KiB.

From the early days of

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