I’ve always found that to be quite annoying, the reported volume of the drive is different from it’s actual maximum. This is due to the way manufactures do math. No really, I’m not kidding, manufactures are allowed to do math in any way they want as long as the post their work on the box. In the case of most they consider 1 Byte to be 8 Bits (And it is, everywhere) so good on them for getting that right. But then when it comes to 1 Kilobyte, they go a little wrong. Instead of reporting 1 Kilobyte to be the correct 1024 Bytes, they say it’s only 1000 Bytes. So they are only a little off, 24 bytes is not that big of a deal, but the problem is compounded later on. When we get to 1 Megabyte, computers know that 1 Megabyte is 1024 Kilobytes, but hard drive manufactures again get their math wrong and report it as 1000 Kilobytes. Now we are off again by only 24, but the problem compounds it’s self as it’s base number of Kilobytes are also wrong. This gets even worse when we get to Gigabytes where 1 Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes. Doing the math their way results in 1 Gigabyte with the value of 1,000,000,000 Bytes, although the computer correctly states that 1 Gigabyte is in fact 1,073,741,824 Bytes. Missing 73 Megabyes not be that big of an issue when we are talking in Gigabyte terms, but what about Terabytes? Where 1 Terabyte is equal to 1000 Gigabytes according to drive makers, but the computer reading 1 Tarabyte as 1024 Gigabytes, the problem really becomes exacerbated. With a difference between the reported size of drive being 1 Terabyte by the manufacture, the computer only sees 901.5 Gigabyes, it’s missing 98.5 Gigabytes, and that’s a huge amount of memory!

All hard drive manufactures are guilty of this, Western Digital only reports the correct value on it's Raptor Hard Drive Series. This is just not good enough, the whole industry is laying about their numbers and is being allowed to get away with it because about 20 years ago they said, "Hey, look it's really not that much data", when they where talking about the difference between a Megabyte total value, but the problem has compounded it's self since then. The short shortsightedness of government oversight, has allowed for this problem to grow with time. Hard Drive manufactures should be REQUIRED to play by the rules, and do their math correctly. The fact the my computer sees the drive's capacity as a different value then that as reported is ridiculousness and something that should be addressed.