Device storage is extremely valuable these days. The rabid appetite of AI datacenters is inflating drive pricing so badly that companies like Apple and Valve have jacked up the prices of some products by hundreds of dollars. Even if that wasn't happening, though, the size of apps, media and operating systems is continually growing, filling up the storage we do have. Some PC and console games can top 100GB, especially if they're live service titles with a lot of downloadable content.

All this is to say that if there's a gap between the amount of storage you're promised for an internal or external drive versus what's actually usable, the disappointment may be palpable now more than ever. Recently, for example, we discovered that a 512GB drive only registered as offering 477GB accessible to Windows. On paper, that 35GB difference might be enough to fit someone's entire photo library, or maybe a converted 4K HDR movie.

In most instances, the root of these discrepancies boils down to how different companies calculate data, rather than a naked attempt to rip you off. At other times, it may be a matter of a device being unusable without some of that space going to pre-installed software.

Frequently, storage makers calculate storage capacity using a base-10 (decimal) system. In that arrangement, a kilobyte is 1,000 bytes, a gigabyte is 1 billion bytes, and so forth. And that probably makes sense to you, given how measurements work in most other areas of life, especially if you live in a country using the metric system for weights and distances.

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