Why is the available storage capacity of my product slightly less than the claimed storage capacity?

This is common with flash storage devices—whether internal SSDs or external USB drives—partly due to the difference in how flash memory and traditional spinning hard drive manufacturers calculate megabytes. HDD manufacturers calculate a megabyte (or 1,000 x 1,000 bytes) as 1,000KB, while flash-based storage uses binary calculations, where 1MB equals 1,024KB.

Example:For a 1TB flash memory storage device, Windows will report the available capacity as 931.32GB. (1,000,000,000,000 ÷ 1,024 ÷ 1,024 ÷ 1,024 = 931.32GB).

Additionally, operating systems reserve some storage space for formatting and other functions, such as firmware and/or controller-specific information, so a portion of the stated capacity is not available for user data storage.