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whurpurgis t1_iu4rern wrote

They’re actually still there but they get tagged so that they can be over written by new data. With the right program, like law enforcement has deleted files can be recovered if they were not over written.

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Boogyman0202 t1_iu4s5k4 wrote

So I've always wondered, is that why when you get a new hard drive that's 1 gig the computer says it's really 998mb ?

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crash866 t1_iu4u0ga wrote

Some manufacturers use base10 for size while your computer measures it is binary.

A gigabyte (GB) -- pronounced with two hard Gs -- is a unit of data storage capacity that is roughly equivalent to 1 billion bytes. In decimal notation (base 10), a gigabyte is exactly 1 billion bytes. In binary notation (base 2), a gigabyte is equal to 230 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes.

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xRmg t1_iu4u7uk wrote

This has to do how hdd manufacturers count bytes. They count in terrabytes, where one TB is 10^12 bytes.

Operating systems count in Tebibytes, where one TiB is 2^40 bytes.

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breckenridgeback t1_iu4sclz wrote

No, that's because the hard drive itself reserves some storage for the programs that manage it (or, if it's a new prebuilt computer, some space is taken by the operating system).

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HaikuBotStalksMe t1_iu528lr wrote

Nope. You lose space because of the file structure. The hard drive has to have a way to make like a table of contents, so to speak, and that info takes up space.

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