I bought a 500gb external harddrive and plugged it in and my computer say total size is 460gb. How come?
by 
Jimmyz101
ANSWERS: 4
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They use the SI measurement of Gb 10^9. Computer use 2^30. So to convert (500 * 10^9) / 2^30 = 465Gb
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there seems to be two definitions of gigabyte. one being 1024 megabytes is a gigabyte, and another being 1000 megabytes is a gigabyte. when you look at the properties of the harddrive, see how many bytes is says it has. it should be somewhere around 500,000,000,000. my comptuers harddrive is supposed to be 100 gigs, but it says 93.1 gb total space. but it also says 100,027,596,800 bytes which seems to actually be a bit over 100 gigs. oh i duno man, the shit has hit the fan. edit: haha, just listen to scottix.
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the drive itself requires space on it for the guts of the programs and files it needs to make it work. in that respect, a hard drive and a floppy disk or a read/write CD are two different things. if you want something that will serve purely as an information (audio, video, pictures, and text documents) depository, then you need to take that into account when copying files to that drive. still, 460 gigabytes is a LOT of storage space. but if that is still not enough for you, try to get your money back for the 500 GB one that you bought, and go pick up a one terabyte drive. they can be obtained at your local best buy.
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