You plug in a USB drive and to your horror, you see a fraction of the space missing! This happens to everyone and with every pen drive, hard disk, and memory card. But, why is it so? Why do you get only 7.45 GB of available space when you actually paid money for 8 GB?

Well, there seem to be different reasons for this, and they have been pretty much discussed over the past on the popular question-and-answer website Quora.

The most common reason that we here from most of the local computer shops is that, a portion of the total memory space is usually reserved for system files and data which helps in better performance. But, do system files really need nearly more than 500 MB out of 8 GB? And if the pen drive is of 16 GB capacity, the reserved space is even more. Somehow it seems not a satisfying reason.

If not this, most people you meet have another reason ready to charge at you. Different operating systems show different usable space! Is this really how it works? If so, why can't it be made same and simple for every users to understand? Is there a need to make this so complex? No answer on that.

But, we seem to have a third reason which somehow seems a lot more logical than the other two given above.

Disk manufacturing companies usually have a different way of calculating space. They calculate 1 MB as being equal to 1,000 KB while the computer thinks in base 2, the binary numeral system, where 1 MB is equal to 1,024 KB.

So, what happens here is that, for every 1 GB of space they advertise in base 2, will be received by us in base 10, i.e., the decimal numerical system. This actually leads to nearly 70 MB of space loss which is actually a loss to all of us.

If you can catch hold of the packaging of a hard disk, you can observe most of the companies publishing it clearly over there that the calculation is based on decimal number system.

[Image Credit: FirmCodes]

So does this mean that companies are actually cheating us by not giving the exact said amount of space? Well not sure on that. May-be they tell 8 GB because they want to make it a little easier for us. Imagine if we had to ask the computer shop keep to give us a 7.45 GB pen drive instead of 8 GB. Isn't that a little difficult? It sure seems so!

Tags : Hard Disk, Storage Volume, Low Storage