I recently purchased an external Hard Drive with 1TB if storage capacity.
The only problem here is when I'm in Windows 7, it shows that it has 930GB available but on Ubuntu it's 993GB. The HDD is partitioned as NTFS.
Which one says the truth?
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Where do you see those capacities ? You might be confusing formatted space versus drive capacity.– BatchyXCommented Dec 15, 2012 at 19:16
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1This may be of assistance...– BreakthroughCommented Dec 15, 2012 at 19:16
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@BatchyX I simply open up the properties window of the mounted drive.– 2hamedCommented Dec 15, 2012 at 20:15
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1 Answer
Unfortunately, Windows always calculate hard drives as powers of 1024 while hard drive manufacturers use powers of 1000. On other hand Ubuntu uses the Standard 1000 division.
Most manufacturers of hard disk drives define,
1 TB = 1000000000000 bytes = 10^12 bytes
While Ubuntu and Windows see it as:
1000000000000/1024*1024*1024 = 931 GB (Windows style) (should be gibibyte (GiB))
1000000000000/1000*1000*1000 = 1000 GB (Ubuntu style)
Ubuntu is showing capacity as 993 GB, because that missing space might be used up by the allocation table and other meta data.
This wiki article explains the issue :
Microsoft Windows reports size in gigabytes by dividing the total capacity in bytes by 1073741824, while still reporting the result with the symbol "GB". This practice is a cause of confusion, as a hard disk with an advertised capacity of, for example, "400 GB" (meaning 400000000000bytes) might be reported by the operating system as only "372 GB". Other software, like Mac OS X 10.6 and some components of the Linux kernel measure using the decimal units.
This SU answer is a very good Explanation on Storage Size Calculation.
