The suspects are the producers
This "problem" does not just happen with hard drives and SSDs, but either with a USB stick or with an external car we will find ourselves in a similar situation. The reason for this difference has come in how manufacturers advertise their equipment in relation to how Windows uses it. On the other hand, there is also a small portion of space (more) that is lost when we format it, and that it is used for file system, boot data, etc., although it is true that this part of the lost space is much smaller.
For the manufacturer of storage devices, be it a hard disk drive, SSD or USB flash drive, KB (Kilobyte) is 1000 byte, MB (Megabyte) is 1000 KB, and GB (Gigabyte) to 1000 MB. In short, if the manufacturer claims that the SSD has 500 GB, the fact is that it contains 500 x 1000 x 1000 x 1000 = 500,000,000,000 bytes of space. In other words, it tells you that it has 500 GB but the fact it has 500,000,000,000 bytes
If we convert this to how Windows translates (which is true, actually), KB is 1024 bytes, MB is 1024 KB and GB is 1024 MB. So, the calculation following the 500 GB SSD example is that we will have 500,000,000,000 split (1024 x 1024 x 1024), and the result gives us 465.66 and not 500 GB.
500,000,000,000 / (1024 * 1024 * 1024) = 465.66 GB
Let's look at an example. Below you can see what Windows gets on the SSD that the advertiser is worth 480 GB:
The manufacturer claims that this SSD is 480 GB, but Windows claims that it actually has 447 GB. However, if you look at the Capacity section, it says it has 480,102,928,384 bytes because as we've mentioned before, the problem lies in how manufacturers optimize hard disk capacity, 1000 multiplication translation instead of 1024. And the result of this is that, in this example, we have 33 GB less real space compared to what the manufacturer told us.
Can anything be done about it?
Unfortunately, no. The fact that manufacturers have decided to advertise capacity in this way is part of the marketing plan and part of saving them for their production processes. They misinterpret the appropriate standard (as we explained, that 1 MB is 1024 and not 1000 bytes) for their benefit.
So, we have to rely on it, and know that if we buy for instance a hard disk with 1 TB capacity, it is actually going to 1000 and not to 1024 GB capacity. This is something that, in order not to be fake advertising, manufacturers should stop doing it, and inform the user of the actual level they will have on their device. However, there have been complaints before in the past and the courts had provided the producers with the law, established the law, and as a result any claim that could make them fall into a broken bag.
As a curious you should know that, in the case of RAM, this does not work that way and if they advertise 16 GB of RAM, we will have the actual promised capacity (in this case, 16,384 MB 16 x 1024) and we will not be met with the unpleasant surprise that the dose is actually lower than it should.
