The issue is in your software that displays the capacity (most likely windows).
You bought 2 TB SSD. You got 2 TB SSD. This is equivalent to 1.8 TiB (think of it like yards and meter). Windows shows you the capacity in TiB, but writes TB next to it.
Say you buy a 2.18 yard stick. You get a 2.2 yard stick, which is equivalent to 2 meter. Windows will tell you it’s 2 yards long. Why? I don’t know.
I think it started out with a rare case of honest advertising. So for example 720K floppies were advertised as 720K. But then some lying bastard clever marketer decided to start advertising their 720K floppies as 1MB floppies, sometimes but not always marked “unformatted capacity”.
And of course this had the desired effect of making people buy their disks instead of the honestly marketed ones, because people didn’t read the small print and thought they were getting more storage, which was important before CDs were a thing and software distributions were starting to need multiple disks. So everyone had to start doing it.
This is as far back as my memory of the practice goes, so it may have started before 720K floppies were mainstream, but that’s why disk manufacturers now advertise the unformatted capacity of their drives instead of the formatted, aka usable, capacity.
For centuries. Justification: Jesus was dead for three days: from Friday afternoon (3pm?), day 1, through Saturday, day 2, and into Sunday early morning (6am?), day 3. Total elapsed time 39 hours. Digital computers were around last century (19xx) and this century (20xx), which is two centuries by the same logic. Also two millenia, but I find “centuries” a more satisfying word. Colossus went into operation in 1943, so that’s 80 years elapsed time.
So it’s Friday December the fifth, 80 AD, 5:30pm, and Mozes is hacking away on his clay tables to nail down the final tally of this week’s adminstration of the amount of cows his boss owns and he goes "Mother fucker! These romans again ripped me off, sold me a clay tablet that only allows me to count to 720 cows, not the 751 I got! FUCK! Now I need another tablet and start tallying from the beginning, you mother fuckers!
Like many have already said, there is a difference in units when talking about actual storage and the storage on the label.
I feel like some marketing team made the changes, because it is technically correct and “easier for normal people to understand”… But that makes it confusing when normal people plug it in so, that team should be thrown overboard.
Can’t tell if this is sarcasm (I’ve been on the internet too much today sorry) but just in case the Greek μ (mu) stands for “micro” since ‘m’ is already used for “milli”
yeah, i get that, but many people just use u because its more accessible (ascii and qwerty compatible), similar to writing μBittorrent as uBittorrent. imo i dont think its too big of a deal if it doesnt match the word micro, since μ is already a bit of a stretch. this is just my opinion, im not advocating for a SI reform or anything :)
μ is not a stretch at all, it’s literally the first character of the word micro. (Mu, iota, kappa, rho, omega). Similar to how other scientific words are derived from their original language.
It doesn’t matter, most people will understand you if you write um instead of μm, because it isn’t ambiguous.
I’ve always known the advertised space is larger than the actual space, but it was never quite the shock as it was when I recently bought an 18TB external drive with ~16 TB usable.
The biggest problem is that Windows still calls TiB and friends with si prefixes (so 1TiB shows as 1TB). MS has done this since DOS (but at least back then MiB didn’t exist. They could’ve used base 10 though).
TiB (and the related) didn’t get named until recently, and I think only Linux uses those abbreviations — and not universally — windows still says kB, mB etc, while using the binary equivalents
I bought a new 2Tb SSD but it shows up as 1.8TB SSD
[An image of a classical art piece. The man in the image is wearing a hat and has a peculiar facial expression. One of his arms is on a table, palm facing up. The other arm is in the air, with the pointer finger touching the palm. Near that hand is the caption “Where’s my 0.2TB”]
The result of marketing pushing base 10 numbers on an archiecture that is base 2. Fundamentally is caused by the difference of 10³ (1000) vs 2¹⁰ (1024).
Actual storage size of what you will buy is Amount = initial size * (1000/1024)^n where n is the power of 10^n for the magnitude (e.g kilo = 3, mega = 6, giga = 9, tera = 12)
its correct, the final size you see in the OS is not kilo/giga/terabytes but kibi/gibi/tebibytes. the problem is less of the drive and more of how the OS displays the value. the OS CHOOSES to display it in base 2, but drives are sold in base 10, and what is given is actually correct. Windows, being the most used one, is the most guilty of starting the trend of naming what should be kibi/gibi/tebibytes as kilo/giga/terabytes. Essentially, 2 Tera Bytes ~= 1.82 Tebibytes. many OS’ display the latter but use the former naming
Base 2 based displays and calling them kilobytes date back to the 1960s. Way before the byte was standardised to be eight bits (and according to network engineers it still isn’t you still see new RFCs using “octet”).
Granted though harddisks seem to have been base-10 based from the very beginning, with the IBM 350 storing five million 6-bit bytes. Window’s history isn’t in that kind of hardware though but CP/M and DOS, and (page 10):
Displays the filename and size in kilobytes (1024 bytes).
Then, speaking of operating systems with actual harddrive support: In Unix ls -lh seems to be universally base-2 based (GNU has –si to switch which I think noone ever uses). -h (and -k) are non-standard, you won’t find them in POSIX (default is to print raw number of bytes, no units).
Unless you mean GB, that’s a fake drive. If you mean GB it’s cause the lower density memory chips are in lower supply as we continue to streamline manufacturing
That’s for the magic numbers that hold the 1.8 TB together. They live in that 0.2 TB and if you kill them then the 1.8 TB fly apart at the speed of light.
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