Now I’ve read through some of the threads hear and I still haven’t found quite an acceptable answer. What is taking up 500GB (5,000MB!) of space on a supposedly 4TB drive. You can’t see it, you can’t erase it (already erased the drive once), same 3.5TB comes back. This is not like saying you have an 8GB drive and it gives you 7.90GB of space because of the file system. We are talking about 500GB of “ghost” data here. What is it? And why so much. Can it be removed/reclaimed or is this paramount to false advertising on WD part because 3.5TB is not 4TB and it’s not any darn files system component.
Unfortunately that sounds fairly normal. Ballpark figures are about 10% capacity loss when drives are formatted, simply due to the minimum size of the blocks used in the format.
There may also be other hidden partitions for things like operating systems and recovery (in this case probably not the latter, but quite possibly the former) which are often required when taken as part of a device and deliberately aren’t easy to access and remove as doing so will lobotomise the device.
Thank you for the response…The unit should be advertised as 3.5TB drive. Since they promote in their literature that you are getting 4TB of “storage”, which is not the case. Anyhow appreciate the reply. For the most part I’m enjoying the drive I just don’t like when companies utilize such…arguably intentional deception to sell a product. 
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To a hard disk manufacturer and consumers, one KB is 1000 bytes … Base 10 Number
To windows and operating systems one KB is 1024 bytes … Base 2 Number
Using the real capacity calculator … USB Hard Disk Real Capacity Calculator -- EndMemo
When you buy a 4TB hard drive … your computer sees it as 3.638TB
You haven’t actually lost any storage space on the hard drive … that’s just how the math works depending on what base number you are using.
Personally, speaking … when growing up with computers in the 80’s i was always taught that 1024 bytes = 1 KB.
Somewhere along the line someone decided it would be easy to say, advertise and think 1000 bytes = 1KB … and that’s when the confusion began.
More reading here: https://www.howtogeek.com/123268/windows-hard-drive-wrong-capacity/
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The same manufacturer counts it as 3.5TB when formatting it. So why this double standards. I don’t see this with other external drives. I get what is advertised. This is definitely unfair advertisement. I am not sure what they achieve by such immoral attitude for such a large company.
not double standards … it’s math
It’s the case for every hard drive on the market today.
every manufacturer does it, not just WD
Joey!
It is math I agree. Your calculation is right, it should be 3.638 TB, but this one shows 3.502 TB, including the space used by the partition file or whatever it comes with.Total bytes itself is 3.852 * 10^12 bytes and not 4*10^12 bytes. That is definitely dishonest by industry standard too. 136GB cant be lost in partitions. Unless it is running its own hidden OS or something. Even then it should show it as used space.
My point is that the math is used differently on pack (using 1000 bytes as one KB) but the same math is used differently when my OS opens it (1024 bytes per KB). That is definitely double standard. Either all the manufacturers discuss with the OS makers, to show it differently (which won’t work I am sure) or change their advertisements.
Else, it is double standard. Even if everyone does it, immoral is immoral. Everyone lies and so I lied too is not a right thing to say is it?
regards
BVS
