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[–] 20 points 3 days ago (5 children)

To make things more confusing, there's a goofy formula which tells you the actual capacity of a given advertised capacity. A drive advertised as 1 TB will always have exactly 1,000,204,886,016 bytes. It helps to have consistency, but nobody seems to knows where the formula came from.

https://superuser.com/questions/1037272/why-does-my-500gb-hard-drive-have-a-capacity-of-exactly-500-107-862-016-bytes

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago

    really? i had two 1tb drives (different model) and for some reason their size was slightly different and one was smaller (as in a few bytes?) so i had to shrink the partition size to dd the data over.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago*

    Slack space for bad sector remapping maybe? Similar to SSDs being over provisioned.

    And with partitions being offset 1MiB from the start of the drive (For alignment), the extra space would help preserve capacity anyway.

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