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I have purchased a WD 1 TB external HDD.From the size specified i should expect i will have 1 TB of disk space.But it came with 930 GB of space.I am getting approximately 70 GB of less space.

Is it natural to have less space than specified amount?

Is there any way to recover those 70 GB space?

70 GB is not such a small amount.If i can retrieve those spaces it would be great.Thanks ......

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    Space is advertised in a different base and this is clearly indicated then base 2 most operating systems use; where in the world is the duplicate?
    – Ramhound
    May 22, 2015 at 4:19

1 Answer 1

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Hard drive manufacturers market drives in terms of decimal (base 10) capacity. In decimal notation, one megabyte (MB) is equal to 1,000,000 bytes, one gigabyte (GB) is equal to 1,000,000,000 bytes, and one terabyte (TB) is equal to 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.

Programs such as FDISK, system BIOS, Windows, and MacOS use the binary (base 2) numbering system. In the binary numbering system, one megabyte is equal to 1,048,576 bytes, one gigabyte is equal to 1,073,741,824 bytes, and one terabyte is equal to 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.

Simply put, decimal and binary translates to the same amount of storage capacity.

Let's say you wanted to measure the distance from point A to point B. The distance from A to B is 1 kilometer or .621 miles. It is the same distance, but it is reported differently due to the measurement.

Decimal capacity / 1,048,576 = Binary MB capacity 
Decimal capacity / 1,073,741,824 = Binary GB capacity
Decimal capacity / 1,099,511,627,776 = Decimal TB capacity

Example:
A 500 GB hard drive is approximately 500,000,000,000 bytes (500 x 1,000,000,000).
500,000,000,000 / 1,048,576 = 476,837 megabytes (MB) = 465 gigabytes (GB)

source:
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/172191en?language=en_US

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    OS X can also be configured to use base 10
    – Ramhound
    May 22, 2015 at 4:22

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