If my hard drive is suppose to be a certain size, why does it show up smaller?

This question is asked often when a person first goes into there disk drive and checks the properties and sees that it is reporting less than the storage space advertised. Example a 40 gigabyte drive will show up around 37 gigabytes. The reason for this without going into all the binary detail is that the way the millions of bytes (data areas) are added up and interpreted by the computer BIOS(basic input/output system) & the operating system will change the actual numbers a little bit because of how they interpret the numbers. (Return to FAQ page)