When I conducted my summer training for teachers, one of the most prevalent questions to me was regarding the “missing” hard disk space.
They kept asking why is it that when you check the storage capacity of a hard disk in Windows Explorer, it’s not exactly as what it is stated even if the hard disk is still new?
At the right is an image of my laptop’s hard disk space. It is supposed to be 40 GB (gigabytes) but why is it only showing 37.2 GB? (Click on the image to make it larger)
Where’s the “missing” 2.8 GB?
The answer lies in the way disk space is being reported. You see, hard disk manufacturers (humans) reports the data in decimal number system while computers in binary. In a decimal system, numbers are counted from 0-9 and expressed as powers of ten. In a binary system, there are only two numbers, 0 and 1 and expressed as powers of two. The prefix BI means two. Computers can only crunch zeros and ones.
