How Big Is A Terabite?

[wizzard]

Sounds like a silly question but . . . I've been looking at a new laptop in Tesco, Acer Aspire E1 531, which is labelled as having a 1Tb HDD.

However, when I've played around with the machine and looked at Windows Explorer, the HDD shows a size of 885Gb and not 1000 or 1024Gb as I would expect to see. The label on the palm rest indicates a HDD of 1000Gb.

Haven't contacted Tesco for an explanation yet but it seems like a pretty decent machine but I don't fancy paying for something I'm not actually going to get.

Any thoughts anyone?

[Zacs-Master]

I'm pretty sure you'll find it's standard practise for the total memory to include that used by the operating system on any computer / laptop / tablet.

[bibblebub]

Use Disk Management to see how the 1TB is distributed in the drives/partitions..

[wizzard]

When I looked at tge disc in Windows Explorer (pressing windows key + E on the keyboard) and viewed the disc it showed the usage out of a total of 885Gb. The only software installed is the OS (can't remember the figure in Gb) which was showing as a blue line so far along the total of 885Gb.

That's what made me think the disc isn't a full Tb.

[bibblebub]

if you were to try Disk Management you'll likely to find at least one other partition

[wizzard]

I'm new to Windows 8, how can I view disc management please?

[bibblebub]

Simplest way is to move the mouse pointer to the bottom left corner of the screen and right-click to bring up a menu of various system programs; Disk Management is halfway up in that list.

[wizzard]

Thanks I'll give that a shot.

[VHG]

A 1TB drive is not really 1TB.

This is because a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, but hard disk makers would "round it down" and call it 1K (1,000), losing the 24.

As disks gets bigger and bigger this "24" gets lost off each kilobyte, so by the time you get to a 1Tb drive you have lost about 70Gb.

So a 1Tb drive will only ever show up as about 930Gb.

But hard disk makers tend to "round up" the size of the hard drive to nice numbers that humans like such as 250Gb, 500Gb, 1Tb, 2Tb and so on.

My guess is that you also have a "hidden" partition containing a copy of Windows, which may be about 30Gb.

So all of a sudden your 1Tb only has about 900Gb of usable space.

You can read more about the lost space here.

http://compreviews.about.com/od/storage/a/ActualHDSizes.htm