What is the average hard drive capacity

Basic Account. You only have access to basic statistics. Single Account. The ideal entry-level account for individual users. Corporate solution including all features. Statistics on " Computer memory and data storage " The most important statistics. The most important statistics. Further related statistics. Seagate global hard disk drive capacity shipped FY, by quarter Seagate vs. WD: hard disk drive capacity shipped worldwide Seagate vs.

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Learn more about how Statista can support your business. July 20, In Statista. Accessed November 12, Statista Inc.. Accessed: November 12, Discrepancy between reported capacity and actual capacity Many people are confused when their operating system reports, for example, that their new 1 Terabyte 1 TB, or GB hard drive is reporting only about gigabytes GB in usable capacity.

Several factors may come into play when you see the reported capacity of a disk drive. Unfortunately, there are two different number systems which are used to express units of storage capacity; binary, which says that a kilobyte is equal to bytes, and decimal, which says that a KB is equal to bytes.

The storage industry standard is to display capacity in decimal. Even though in binary you have more bytes, the decimal representation of a GB shows greater capacity. In order to accurately understand the true capacity of your disk drive, you need to know which base unit of measure binary or decimal is being used to represent capacity. Another factor that can cause misrepresentation of the size of a disk drive is BIOS limitations. Many older BIOS are limited in the number of cylinders they can support.

That worked well enough for a decade or two because everybody who talked KB knew that the term implied bytes. However, almost overnight a much more numerous "everybody" bought computers, and the trade computer professionals needed to talk to physicists and engineers and even to ordinary people, most of whom know that a kilometer is meters and a kilogram is grams. Often when two or more people begin discussing storage capacity, some will refer to binary values and others will refer to decimal values without making distinction between the two.

This has caused much confusion in the past. You may select the license of your choice. You cannot overwrite this file. The following page uses this file: File:Hard drive capacity over time. The following other wikis use this file: Usage on en.

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