500GB HDD shows 465GB internally

WD External and Portable SSD Portable SSD
1

Hello folks,

I just bought a 500GB Passport HDD and after connecting it, the system clearly shows it has 465GB free. I do know that 1024mb = 1GB but that still doesn’t account for 20GB of missing space.

I hope someone has an answer to this.

Best Regards,

Sabier

2

The space is not missing, is just a consequence of the format system. Normally the external hard drives are formatted using FAT32 system and this produce some lose of space. If you want recover some space you can format your drive using NTFS system.

Best Regards. 

3

The difference has to do with binary arithmetic, not formatting.

See the following Wikipedia articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

1GiB = 1024MiB

1MiB = 1024KiB

1KiB =1024B

Therefore …

1GiB = 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1 073 741 824 bytes

1GB = 1 000 000 000 bytes

500GB = 465GiB

4

Aah I get it.

Much thanks for the information. I wasn’t aware of the conversion.

Best Regards,

Sabier