In any case, this could be seen as a bit of a lie on their part, since they are using a legal loophole to make us believe that these storage units have more capacity than they actually bring.
What is the real capacity of a USB flash drive?
Suddenly one day you buy a 2GB USB memory because it’s enough to store that 1.8GB movie you have on your computer, however, when you try to insert it, you realize that you don’t don’t have enough space. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Well yes, he has his explanation.
It’s all due to marketing and the permission they have to express their data in decimal format, that is, when you go to buy a 1GB flash drive, legally these don’t have to be 1024MB as they really should.
The Seagate site, one of the largest manufacturers of hard drives, explains it very clearly.
Hard drive manufacturers market drives in terms of decimal capacity (decimal numbering system). In decimal notation, a megabyte (MB) equals 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) equals 1,000,000,000 bytes, and a terabyte (TB) equals 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.
For this reason, the more storage capacity you want to acquire, the more space they will “rip off” you.
Everything comes because really a child megabyte 1,048,576 bytesTherefore, we will lose this excess peak not only in this MB, but in all subsequent ones, and that can add up to quite a bit.
A practical example can be seen in a hard drive or a 1TB thumb drive, this would only have 931GB available. Something that is far from reality, since a terabyte should be 1024 gigabytes. They “steal” almost 100 GB from us.
It is something that we can normalize if we buy a computer with a disk of lesser capacity, since we know that the operating system will take up space, as well as the partitions it has and the data necessary for its operation.
However, the fact that it is proportional to the space is worrying, especially if one is looking for a very high capacity. For example, a few days ago I bought a NAS with a prepared 4TB disk, and as you can guess, my real capacity is 3.6TB. You could say that in general terms they took 400 GB from my face. These are not the 10 or 15 that an operating system can occupy, we are talking about very high quantities.
But it works like that with all brands and suppliers, so it’s something you have to take into account, especially in high capacities, and calculate for yourself before buying, what the reality will be.
To give you an idea, of each gigabyte is lost when converting it from decimal to binary, approximately 70 MBso that you can create the account easily.
