How many gigs in a terabyte?

J

janmenjoy

Moderator
I just bought a new 1 Terabyte external hard drive to back up my files, but when I plugged it into my computer, Windows says the total capacity is only about 931 GB. I’m really confused because I thought a terabyte was exactly 1,000 gigabytes. Is my drive defective, or is there a chunk of storage missing?
 
Your drive is totally fine! Manufacturers sell drives using decimal math (1 TB=1,000 GB), but Windows calculates storage in binary (1 TB≈931 GiB, where 1 GB=1,024 MB). You have all the space you paid for; Windows is just measuring it with a different ruler.
 
So, your drive isn’t broken; it’s a math translation issue! Manufacturers sell storage using human math (base 10), where 1 TB is one trillion bytes. But computers speak binary (base 2), dividing by 1,024 instead of 1,000. Those same trillion bytes simply translate to 931 "computer gigabytes." Nothing's actually missing!
 
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