full image - Repost: Why the storage amount your NAS reports for a drive is less than the advertised size of the drive? (from Reddit.com, Why the storage amount your NAS reports for a drive is less than the advertised size of the drive?)
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You might have noticed that, if you put a drive in your NAS, the NAS will report it as less than the advertised drive size. For example, an 18TB should be reported by your NAS as being around 16.37TB.But why is this?There are 2 kinds of Terabytes.A decimal Terabyte, which is how drives are advertised.And a binary Terabyte, which is how drives are reported by a QNAP NAS.There are about 1.09957 decimal Terabytes in a binary Terabyte.If you map a network drive on a PC, Windows will likely report the size in binary. Mac will likely report in decimal.So when a customer tells me they want a certain amount of storage, I assume they want the QNAP NAS to report that it has that much storage, which is reported in binary. So you can account for RAID redundancy according to the RAID type you choose and then divide by 1.09957 to get about what your NAS should report.But why 2 kinds of TB?Computers think in base2. And when Base2 is used, it does not always work out to exact orders of 10, 100, 1000 when you go up in orders of magnitude.For example, if your PC has 512MB RAM and you double it, do you have 1.024GB RAM. (did I just date myself by saying that?) Or do you have 1GB RAM? Your PC will likely say you have 1GB RAM. RAM is size is calculated in binary.This may seem like a small difference. But it compounds as you go up in orders of magnitude.Are there 1000KB in a MB and 1000 MB in a GB and 1000 GB in a TB?Or to go from KB to TB do you multiply by 1024 to get to MB and then X 1024 for GB and then X 1024 for TB?The difference compounds so that the difference between binary and decimal keeps getting larger as we go up in orders of magnitude for our storage.Will we see the day when the binary amount of storage on a drive is less than half of the decimal amount? Drives would have to get a lot larger before that would happen.For now, you can take the advertised storage amount for a drive and divide by about 1.09957 to get how large your NAS should say the drive is.
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