After installing a 1 TB hard drive, a technician notices the OS is reporting significantly less unformatted capacity than was expected. Which of the following is the root cause?

Question

Options

• ANTFS is using up capacity
• BThe OS is reporting raw capacity
• CThe OS is reporting capacity using base 2 numbers
• DThere was old data previously stored on the drive

• B
  3% (1)
• C
  3% (1)
• D
  94% (33)

Explanation

NOTE: The stated correct answer (D) is highly questionable from a technical standpoint. The standard, well-established reason a 1 TB drive reports less capacity than expected is Option C: hard drive manufacturers market capacity in decimal (1 TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes), while operating systems report in binary (1 GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes), causing a 1 TB drive to appear as approximately 931 GB - a 'significant' shortfall. Option D (old data on the drive) would reduce available free space but would not change the total raw/unformatted disk capacity, which is a fixed physical property. Option A is wrong because NTFS overhead is small and only applies post-format. Option B is wrong because OSes report using binary (base 2), not raw decimal. If you encounter this question on a CompTIA or similar exam, the overwhelmingly accepted correct answer in the industry is C.

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