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?
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A. B. C. D.D.
The root cause of the issue is most likely option C, which states that the operating system is reporting capacity using base 2 numbers. This is because hard drive manufacturers often use the metric system to calculate storage capacity, where 1 kilobyte (KB) is 1000 bytes, 1 megabyte (MB) is 1000 KB, 1 gigabyte (GB) is 1000 MB, and so on.
However, computers use the binary system, where 1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes, 1 megabyte is 1024 KB, 1 gigabyte is 1024 MB, and so on. This means that when a manufacturer states that a hard drive has a capacity of 1 terabyte (TB), which is equivalent to 1000 GB, it actually has a capacity of 931.32 GB when measured in binary, which is what the operating system uses.
Therefore, when the technician installed the 1 TB hard drive and checked its capacity in the operating system, they expected to see 931.32 GB of unformatted capacity. However, the operating system is reporting significantly less capacity than that, which suggests that it is reporting using base 2 numbers.
Option A, which suggests that NTFS is using up capacity, is unlikely to be the root cause because NTFS is a file system and does not affect the raw capacity of the hard drive. Option B, which suggests that the operating system is reporting raw capacity, is also unlikely because raw capacity should be equal to the unformatted capacity, which the technician already knows is less than expected. Finally, option D, which suggests that there was old data previously stored on the drive, is also unlikely because the capacity reported by the operating system should not be affected by any data stored on the drive.