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I bought a laptop that was advertised as having 512GB hard drive. But when I checked in windows explorer it shows a size of only 475 GB

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I also checked system information and that is displaying following screen

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It says 512,105,932,800 bytes in brackets but then converts it to 476.94GB. My question is how come? On Google I see following conversion:

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Can someone explain this to me? Who is right?

morpheus
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    I'm sure this has been asked before but I can't find it right now… Look up 'gibibytes' & compare to 'gigabytes'. in gibibytes you get 476.9 See https://superuser.com/search?q=gigabytes+gibibytes for search results on here. – Tetsujin Sep 04 '20 at 16:15
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    @Tetsujin I found it, see closed vote reason – Moab Sep 04 '20 at 16:22
  • @Moab yes that answers the question. Also I found this https://superuser.com/a/911392/84951 which helped. So its windows who is wrong and displaying the size in GiB but claiming it as GB - that is explanation to who is right. – morpheus Sep 04 '20 at 16:25
  • "Can someone explain this to me? Who is right?" Short answer is, they both are, from their own particular perspective. HDD manufactures use base10 definitions of Kilo, Mega, Giga, and Tera, whereas everyone else uses base2. Kibi, Mebi, Gibi, and Tebi are used to disambiguate and make clear we're talking about base2 math where 1KB is 1024 bytes, and 1MB is 1,048,576. Its difficult to say either is wrong. – Frank Thomas Sep 04 '20 at 16:26
  • @morpheus well, the abbreviation GiB and term Gibibyte is a bizarre thing.. techies don't normally say Gibibytes.. They say Gigabyte and by context it is guessed what is meant.. and normally it doesn't matter. Normally a hard drive is meant to be measured in the the maths style 10^n form of Kilo/Giga/Tera. But in the computer world still it could be measured in 2^n. Windows makes it absolutely clear which it is using, because it shows not just GB but bytes. And you see they are different digits not just a decimal point movement. So you know the factor is /1024^n or /1.024^n – barlop Sep 04 '20 at 16:43
  • @morpheus similarly, RAM is supposed to be measured in Gibibytes.. But who says that. Nobody. People say Gigabytes of RAM. It's a crazy formulation. And they expect people to redefine the meaning of GB in computing – barlop Sep 04 '20 at 16:45
  • personally, I've always thought of it as a way to skimp; advertising vs reality. – Tetsujin Sep 04 '20 at 16:48
  • @Tetsujin Probably that too. If they advertised 500GB as the normal computing GB, then they'd have to give you more bytes than the sci notation one they use. But also the scientific notation GB in computing is a bit odd, and to say that GB is the sci notation one and GiB is the standard computing one is absolutely ridiculous. KB and MB etc in computing are already a strong convention as 2^n and have been for decades. e.g. that a megabyte is 1048576 (aka 1024KB), and a kilobyte is 1024 is standard convention in computing. – barlop Sep 04 '20 at 17:10
  • @morpheus - Windows isn't wrong. You are just comparing the same size, but one value is in base 2, and the other is in base 10. It's would be like saying that `1000` and 8 are not the same value, one is base 2 the other is base 10. – Ramhound Sep 04 '20 at 20:17

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