Why hard drives and memory cards have less space than claimed?

Why hard drives and memory cards have less space than claimed?

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  Have you ever bought a 16 GB memory card but you get only 14.83 GB. Is it a fraud or a faulty piece??? Let's see...

  We humans are so accustomed to decimal system. We always count to the base of 10. Like if I say 1 kilometre, it is basically 10^3 metre. But the computer world does not function in decimal system like our ordinary math. It works in binary system where every thing is counted with the base 2. So if I say 1 GB, it is basically 1024 MB.

  But people won't understand calculations in binary. So manufacturers calculate 1GB = 1000MB for the sake of ease. But the computers read the card or drive in binary only. So this results into a difference of few MBs. This difference even increases when you buy larger disks or drives.

  Besides this, our OSes take some space to format our drives and disks into readable format. Thus we get even less space. 

  This is the reason we always get less space than claimed in memory cards or hard drives or disks.

Posts before October 2021 have been marked as "Old Posts". Less likely, but they might have out dated or incorrect information, ugly looking bits of code, no labels, etc. Don't get me wrong, many of these posts are top-notch and interesting too.

I thought it would be better not to delete or revamp these posts, even if they suck. The bitter truth is that old works always suck, but I take that as a positive tool to convey that I am growing. Besides there's no better way to showcase my journey without these old, messy, poorly written posts!

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