Less Storage Explained! - Why Hard Drives and Memory Cards Have Less Space Than Advertised

Almost all storage devices, whatever it may be, SD Cards, Hard drives, Pen drives, etc also come with less storage than the actual size claimed on the package and when asked, we only answer 'Storage is used as System Partition' which is not true in most cases. Actual size of the Firmware in any pen drive or memory card aka SD Cards is of few bytes or even smaller. So What actually takes space and why do we get less storage capacity then what is claimed or advertised.

It's not because you got a defective card, it's not because your card is preloaded with a bunch of unwanted files (some external hard drives may come with preloaded software), and its not because the manufacturers are cheating you by skimping out on the storage space (not directly, at least).

So before running for the answer to the question, let's try to learn more about storage. Humans and our normal decimal numeral system follow numbers in base 10. i.e. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and then we add one more digit and round it to 10. So here the count from 0 to 9 is 10 and thus we have the base 10.

Computers, On the other hand, think in base 2, that is known as the binary numeral system. i.e. they only understand 0, 1 and after 2 counts, they add one more digital and round it to 10. So here the count of 0 and 1 is 2 and thus we have the base 2.

Now to make everything clear, each product is advertised in base 10 and you actually receive about 70 megabytes less than a gigabyte in base 2. Memory cards aren't as bad as hard drives since they are smaller in size as compared to hard drives. Bigger the storage, bigger is the difference between what the box tells you and what your computer reports.

Now comes the tricky maths, one megabyte on their products is equal to 1,000,000 bytes and that to a computer is 1,048,576 bytes.  Thus making a difference of few bytes.

Thus you might get 29.80GB in 32GB Pendrive

The following tables explain everything in detail.

8 Bit = 1 Byte

1024 Byte = 1 KiloByte

1024 KB = 1 MegaByte

1024 MB = 1 GigaByte

1024 GB = 1 TeraByte

This is the actual conversion of storage and which is usually followed by all operating systems which may be windows, Linux or even mac.

The following tables explain storage according to humans/manufacturers. 

8 bit = 1 byte

1000 b = 1 kilobyte

1000 kb = 1 megabyte

1000 mb = 1 gigabyte

1000 gb = 1 terabyte.

This is what is actually manufactured and advertised wrongly.