The difference in hard drive capacity is due to using decimal versus binary counting.
Everybody knows that 1 KB of RAM isn't 1,000 bytes, it is 1,024 bytes. Computers are binary, so it makes sense to count things in terms of powers of two, and since 2^10 is about equal to 10^3, computer scientists started using "kilo" to mean 1,024 of something. Similarly, 1 MB of RAM isn't 1,000,000 bytes, but 1,048,576 bytes. 1 GB of RAM isn't 1,000,000,000 bytes, but 1,073,741,824 bytes.
That works all well and good for RAM, but for some reason hard drive manufacturers decided that 1 MB of hard drive space equals 1,000,000 bytes. However, Windows reports hard drive space using the binary notation.
So when a hard drive has a capacity of 200 GB, the hard drive manufacturers mean that it is 200,000,000,000 bytes. Dividing that by 1,073,741,824 bytes gives 186 GB as reported by Windows.
Some people think that to remedy the confusion, 1 KB should mean 1,000, and 1 KiB (notice the little "i" in there) should mean 1,024, and so on for other prefixes. This hasn't caught on, though.
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Originally Posted by triviumrocks89
no it doesnt 1 equeals 1 and 0.99999 equeals 0.99999
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That's true, but we're not talking about whether 1 = 0.99999. 0.99999 certainly doesn't equal one, but 0.9 followed by an
infinite number of nines does.