Win a Seagate 14TB Barracuda Pro Desktop Drive Worth $580 or 14TB Ironwolf Pro NAS Worth $600 from Scan

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• 

  MrZ on 13/09/2018 - 04:35

  +1

  How do they define 14TB anyway? Isn't it effectively 13TB? Kind of misleading if you ask me.

  • 

    O15 on 13/09/2018 - 06:50

    If you're referring to the formatted capacity, it's no more misleading than labelling a 500GB drive as 500GB.

    • 

      MrZ on 13/09/2018 - 12:14

      True, but in the case of the 500GB drive, even after formatting, it still rounds up to 500. Not the case with 14TB.

      • 

        Wreckin Ball on 14/09/2018 - 23:22

        It is a marketing simplification due to how bits and bytes work and how this impacts a drives size when formatted.
        And a 500Gb HDD will show less than 500GB when formatted - my 500GB Samsung 850 Evo shows 465GB and 500,105.736,192 bytes when formatted (so neither shows a nice exact 500GB or 5,000,000,000 bytes). Some other factors may change the indicated drive size in Windows Explorer(WE) For example, a system drive in a laptop may have an extra hidden recovery partition further reducing the OS partition size in WE.

        Kilobyte (KB) = 1,024 bytes
        Megabyte (MB) = 1,024 kilobytes or 1,048,576 bytes
        Gigabyte (GB) = 1,024 megabytes or 1,073,741,824 bytes
        Terabyte (TB) = 1,024 gigabytes or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes
        

        Now due to the HDDs being reported in base 2 (something we are not used to) and the manufacturers reporting it in base 10 (like metric in base 10 - something we are used to, compared to feet which is base 12), we get drives size misreported. For base 2, a good analogy is to think of RAM being sold in 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, et cetera (or all in 2's - 2, 2x2, 2x2x2, 2x2x2x2).
        These are direct comparisons (sometimes slight variations and differences due to manufacturers)
        Advertised — ~Actual Capacity
        10GB — ~9.31 GB
        20GB — ~18.63 GB
        30GB — ~27.94 GB
        40GB — ~37.25 GB
        60GB — ~55.88 GB
        80GB — ~74.51 GB
        100GB — ~9.13 GB
        120GB — ~111.76 GB
        160GB — ~149.01 GB
        180GB — ~167.64 GB
        200GB — ~186.26 GB
        250GB — ~232.83 GB
        320GB — ~298.02 GB
        400GB — ~372.53 GB
        500GB — ~465.66 GB
        640GB — ~596.05 GB
        750GB — ~698.49 GB
        1TB — ~931.32 GB

        Plenty of info online about this phenomenon and I have tried to keep it relatively simple - check it out if I wrote this too confusingly (sorry)
        Hope this has helped a little. :-)