Do You Know Why Hard Disks & Pen Drives Have Less Space Than The Promised Space

Pen drives, hard disks come under the category of USB flash drive. USB flash drive is also known as USB drive or USB stick. It is a data storage device with an integrated USB interface which includes flash memory. Presently, pen drives and external hard disks have been part of our life just like smartphones. But have you ever checked that the pen drives storage capacity is different to that of the promised space by the manufacturer?

Yes, the storage space differs for sure. For example, let us take a 8 GB pen drive and after plugging it to your computer, you can see that only 7.46 GB space is available.

Then where is the rest of 0.54 GB ? Scratching your head and cursing the manufacturer? Well, there is a trick used by the manufacturer here. Let me  explain it clearly.

A simple of math involved in this. Generally, every one of us knows that computers work using number 2 as the base. According to this the memory management will be :

1 KiloByte (KB) = 1024 Bytes

1 Megabyte (MB) = 1024 Kilobytes (KB)

1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1024 Megabytes (MB)

8 GB = 1024 * 8 = 8192 MB

But pen drive and hard disks manufacturers consider it as base 10. i.e

1 KiloByte (KB) = 1000 Bytes

1 Megabyte (MB) = 1000 Kilobytes (KB)

1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1000 Megabytes (MB)

8 GB = 1000 * 8 = 8000 MB ( approximately equal to 7.81 GB)

and the rest of the memory (approximately 0.35GB ) is reserved for data sector and system files for better performance.

As the device memory capacity increases, we lose more amount of space. The table below shows some shocking figures.

Manufacturers are actually not cheating anyone in this whole drama. In fact, they mention this on the box of hard disks and pen drives. Take a close look at your hard disk boxes.