Why does a 2 TB drive show up as only 1.8 TB in Windows?
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MellowCedar42
I understand that drive manufacturers advertise 2 TB using decimal units, while Windows displays the capacity using binary units, so the drive appears as roughly 1.8 TB. What does that mean in practice when downloading games or other large files? If a game or file is listed as 100 GB, would I be able to store twenty of them, or only around eighteen?
Answers
You don't need to reserve exactly 20% of an SSD, but keeping some free space is helpful for updates, temporary files, and maintenance. Around 5–10% free is a reasonable practical target; the main point is not to plan on using every last byte.
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If those files are truly 100 decimal GB each, twenty would theoretically fit on a 2 TB drive. If they are 100 GiB as Windows measures them, only about 18.6 would fit. In reality, you should expect slightly less because of formatting overhead, system files, and other data already on the drive.
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For Steam, the displayed download size and installed size aren't always identical. Downloads can be compressed, and the installed game may take more space after decompression. Treat the required disk-space figure as the important one, and leave some free capacity rather than filling the drive completely.
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The difference comes from the units. Drive manufacturers use 1 TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, while Windows traditionally labels binary-sized units as TB even though they are technically tebibytes (TiB). A 2 TB drive therefore shows up as about 1.81 TB in Windows. A file listed as 100 GB might use either convention, depending on the program, so the exact number varies.
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