Absolutely Tech

Many of you would’ve been confused after seeing that it showed less space on computer than it was printed on the hard drive. It happened with me too. When I bought my first 20GB harddisk and was surprised to see only 18.6 GB. I was about to return it back claiming it was damaged when I researched and found out why.

Here’s the explanation.
HDD manufacturers label and make the HDDs using 1000 bytes = 1kb (kilobyte), 1000kb = 1mb (megabyte) and so on. But according to computers 1024 bytes = 1 kb, 1024 kb = 1 mb and so on.
So, computer always will recognize less space due to different measurement values.

Take the analogy of money here. Say, you have a 100 cents, which is 1$ for normal people. Now some crazy guy believes that 120 cents make 1$. For him you won’t have a complete dollar, you’ll have 0.833$. Same is the case with computers. HDD manufacturers are the normal guys, while computer is the crazy one .

For calculating actual disk space of any size of disk. Do this:
If you have a 40 GB HDD, calculate its equivalent in bytes using 1000 bytes =1 kb concept. As this is used by manufacturers.
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My desktop computer was running extremely slow but it wasn’t like this before. Even formatting didn’t help, so I knew for sure that there was a problem with hardware. I was right on that, DMA mode wasn’t being detected by XP.

For your knowledge, DMA (Direct Memory Access) is a mode supported by modern hard-disks/DVD drives for much faster access times to device. To check if your HDD’s working on DMA mode, follow these steps:
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