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I wanted to know more about whether there are technical issues with building a 1TiB Hard Drive (same for 1GiB, 1MiB, etc.) Do these things relate to how 8 bits fit into a byte, and how computers operate?

Or are we simply in a time where manufacturers have decided to just continue with the status quo of building 1TB Hard Drives that are 931 GiB, and there are no actual technical issues that would arise from creating a 1 TiB Hard Drive (marketed as 1TB).

Thanks

Sunil Sandhu
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  • Which the **HDD model**? Which [file sytem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system) was used to format that HDD? NTFS? – Jorge Luiz May 21 '20 at 15:15
  • It's hypothetical. For example, a 64GB iPhone doesn't actually have 64GiB of available memory (as in, the user of the phone doesn't receive the amount of memory that was advertised to them. So I want to know what the technical challenges are (if any) for creating a 64GB hard drive that actually has 64GiB available. – Sunil Sandhu May 21 '20 at 15:18
  • Ok, but you must tell us which file system was used to format that HDD. – Jorge Luiz May 21 '20 at 15:21

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It is indeed a matter of converting bits to bytes.

Manufacturers could put more room into a disk to get to an actual 1TB if they wanted to, but given that no one actually expects a 1TB drive to actually hold 1TB, they would have more costs producing the drive than people would know that their drive is actually holding slightly more data than other drives.

This 1,000 vs 1,024 conversion is a marketing trick used back in the day that became so standard, that it is now basically not a trick anymore, but it became the norm.

Going away from the norm only means that, as a manufacturer, you pay more to produce the drive.

Now, that said, I do believe there are some brands that actually produce drives close to the 1,024 conversion number, but there is no clear list or indication for which drives this is true or not.

When it comes for shopping for drives, look at the price and check reviews and make an informed decision based on that.

LPChip
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  • Right okay, so with that said, would it be fair to say that there are no technical challenges involved with creating a 'true' 1TB drive (that holds 1024TiB) and no issues chunks of memory no longer being equally divisible equal amounts of bits/bytes? – Sunil Sandhu May 21 '20 at 15:38
  • @SunilSandhu indeed. There never were. Look back at the small drives. We've had drives of 10 mb, 20mb, 40mb 50mb, etc...We just round them up to big numbers because that's what happens everywhere. Want to make something look cheaper, reduce the price by 1 cent. 500 euro looks far more expensive than 499,99. – LPChip May 21 '20 at 16:33
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    Interesting! Thank you for the advice @LPChip, I'm in the process of researching a video I'm producing on the topic and your words of wisdom have certainly been useful. Thanks! – Sunil Sandhu May 21 '20 at 18:14