The reason why your drive shows less storage than you paid for

Despite showing the storage amount on the box or the spec sheet, your new device might not actually hold as much as it states. Here are the reasons why. The reason why your drive shows less storage than you paid for.

News Computing The reason why your drive shows less storage than you paid for Understanding the difference between decimal and binary. The rabid appetite of AI datacenters is inflating drive pricing so badly that companies like Apple and Valve have jacked up the prices of some products by hundreds of dollars. Even if that wasn’t happening, though, the size of apps, media and operating systems is continually growing, filling up the storage we do have.

Some PC and console games can top 100GB, especially if they’re live service titles with a lot of downloadable content. All this is to say that if there’s a gap between the amount of storage you’re promised for an internal or external drive versus what’s actually usable, the disappointment may be palpable now more than ever. Recently, for example, we discovered that a 512GB drive only registered as offering 477GB accessible to Windows.

On paper, that 35GB difference might be enough to fit someone’s entire photo library, or maybe a converted 4K HDR movie. In most instances, the root of these discrepancies boils down to how different companies calculate data, rather than a naked attempt to rip you off.