Two virtually identical installations: C drive on one is 10GB larger

Jaylob4 · 20 Apr 2021

Wisewiz said:

Bree, Many thanks for all this time you've spent helping an old man with a not-terribly-important matter.
I used the DISM reset option, and it sucked 3 Gigs of unnecessary stuff from SxS. Yay! The rest is too diffuse and insubstantial to bother with, now that I know there's nothing major causing the size difference between C on #1 and C on #2. Thanks again. I'm going to mark this Solved now. As we say up here in the Great White North, "Have an iced eh?" (which sounds exactly like what you folks say in the Tropical South, if you say it carefully). BTW: We're having snow tomorrow in Southern Ontario.

Hi,

I have nothing to add but maybe the clue is in your 1st post, "with essentially the same software installed on both, both with two SSDs, both running the same build of W10 Pro 20H2"..

Essentially but not the same which is why the difference, still 10gb is a chunk.

But I have been in a situation where two identical new PCs, everything the same--everything, then each loaded with retail copies of Win 7 Home, yet there was just under a gig in difference, why? always did puzzle me that.

Then just recently I bought a 120gb SSD, got just over 111gb on the actual drive.

I know there is a difference in what calculation is used for GBs, ( decimal or binary ), I still think the consumer is being misled.

8-10gb is a lot not to have.

Manufacturer's of SSDs and HDDs won't shift but I think a typical GB value should be given on their package or sales blurb.

I'm digressing.

Wisewiz · 20 Apr 2021

That was an important digression. It seems to me that most of the SSD manufacturers are committing fraud by stating the sizes of their SSDs and delivering ten, twenty Gigs less than what's on the box. I too understand the different methods of calculating, but these discrepancies go way beyond that difference. Some companies have things in the "small print" that nobody reads, like "Some of the listed capacity on a Flash storage device is used for formatting and other functions and thus is not available for data storage. As such, the actual available capacity for data storage is less than what is listed on the products. For more information, go to Kingston’s Flash Memory Guide at kingston.com/flashguide." But consumers routinely complain to vendors about the package-reality difference, and it's often significant. Here's an example from an Amazon review: " ... And the 480GB storage is actually a 447GB storage." That's too big a difference by a long shot.

bobkn · 20 Apr 2021

Wisewiz said:

(snip)

Here's an example from an Amazon review: " ... And the 480GB storage is actually a 447GB storage." That's too big a difference by a long shot.

A 480GB drive will show up in Windows as 447GB. That's because Windows makes a gigabyte 2^30 bytes (1.074 decimal GB).

For example: my system drive is a WD SN850 SSD, nominally 1TB. Under its Properties, it has a capacity of 999,421,898,752 bytes. Or 930GB, in Windows parlance. (In Storage, 931GB.) WD has cheated me out of 578MB, or 0.0578% of its nominal capacity. I doubt that I'll sue.