re: PC Discussion - Gaming, Performance and Enthusiasts

HDD companies just use decimal base 10, so they treat 1GB as 1000MB, a MB as 1000KB, and a KB as 1000B, etc. Windows uses binary, where 1024MB = 1GB and so on. What you really have is a 500,000,000,000 Byte hard drive, even though 500 "Gigabytes" would be 536,870,912,000 bytes in binary (500GB x 1024MB x 1024KB x 1024B). If you divide 500,000,000,000 Bytes by (1024MB x 1024KB x 1024B), you'll see that 500 billion Bytes = just over 465 binary GB.

Sneaky hard drive companies... If arguing semantics, though, the HDD manufacturers are correct in the way they advertise sizes, because they are using the SI prefix (metric), whereas the binary prefix is actually supposed to be read in terms in kibibyte (KiB instead of KB), mebibyte (MiB instead of MB), and gibibyte (GiB) instead of GB. For the super anal-retentive, it's technically incorrect for Windows to read the space in binary and report it with metric prefixes. Too late to change that now, probably. Seeing GiB in Explorer would be weird and confusing.