Drive is Showing Wrong Capacity

When viewing my device on a computer, the capacity displayed does not match the capacity advertised.

Often when you purchase a drive, the capacity displayed by the computer is smaller than the advertised capacity (e.g. 250GB hard drive displayed as 232.83GB total capacity). This discrepancy is caused because there are two standards for measuring storage capacity, decimal and binary.

Most manufacturers use a decimal, base 10 conversion rate to calculate capacity where 1GB = 1 Billion Bytes or 1000^3 Bytes. However, most Operating Systems use a binary, base 2 conversion rate where 1GB = 1.074 Billion Bytes or 1024^3 Bytes. Therefore, an advertised 250GB (250 Billion Bytes) hard drive’s capacity based on your system’s standard is 233GB.