why is it that my flash drive displayed 8 gig in the package and when I look at it in the system properties it doesn't equal to 8 gig..is it a bug or not? justify
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3Duplicate of Why do hard drives display a size lower than the true value?, Why is the effective hard drive size lower than the actual size? and many more (just see the Linked questions on those pages).– KaranJul 10, 2013 at 18:38
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4 Answers
This is because hard drive manufacturers measures a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes, where as the real size of a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes.
So your flash drive is actually going to be roughly 8,000,000,000 bytes in size. So the size of the drive in real gigabytes will be about 7.45058GB
The higher we go up in binary units (like from GB to TB) that bigger the difference becomes larger as the effect is accumulative due to powers of 1000 being used instead of powers of 1024.
Real sizes:
- Kilobyte = 1024 bytes.
- Megabyte = 1024 x 1024 bytes.
- Gigabyte = 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes.
- Each higher unit would be multiplied by an extra 1024.
Hard Drive manufacturer's units:
- Kilobyte = 1000 bytes.
- Megabyte = 1000 x 1000 bytes.
- Gigabyte = 1000 x 1000 x 1000 bytes.
- Each higher unit would be multiplied by an extra 1000.
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@user237081 if this answers your question, please accept it by clicking the check mark.– MattDMoJul 10, 2013 at 14:58
This is because of the decimal prefixes an their meanings, the historical prefixes are based on 10^3 (1,000)
E.g. the prefix "Giga-" means x10^9, which is one billion (1,000,000,000)
When dealing with informational systems, 1024 (2^10) is used as the base value.
Since 2005 the binary multiples are standard (Kibi-, Mebi-, Gibi-,...),
That means one Gibibyte (Gib) equals 1,073,741,824 Byte.
The industry uses the old system, that means there can in fact be 8x10^9 (8,000,000,000) Bytes stored on your flash drive.
But if you divide that by the above-mentioned GiB-value, you end up with 7.45GiB of Memory, which is what your OS should display.
its the formated size
and then you get in to the whole "1 gig is not 1000 MB its 1024 MB" area
is there a MAJOR difference?
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@Joldfield101 The problem with Gibibyte vs Gigabyte is that they both have the same acronym "GB". Same with Gibibit and Gigabit being shortened to "Gb". So the confusion between decimal and binary units would still remain. Jul 10, 2013 at 12:54
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yeah, i appreciate the problem, but i was merely making the user aware of the proper reason. Jul 11, 2013 at 9:53
There's a nice table on the right-hand side of this Wikipedia article
A binary gigabyte is 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes = 1073741824
A decimal gigabyte is equivalent to 1000 x 1000 x 1000 bytes = 1000000000
When the manufacturer states "8GB", they could be referring to either one of these counting systems. My hunch is that they are using the decimal system, which consequently means you will have slightly less than 8GB in the binary system which your computer is displaying.
