Where have the gigs gone?

[EdoKoi]

why is it, that when i purchase hard drives...(seagate in particular),

i purchased a 120GB, but when it's installed it says i have 111GB?

what's the deal with that?

where's the rest of the Gigs?

or is it just another mystery, like my missing socks from the dryer?

oh, and that's right out of the box, no software were installed on it yet.

 

[NeoNemesis]

well Windows Xp automatically takes away around 5 gigs. but that isn't enough.

 

[EdoKoi]

yeah, i figured that out when i had my 60GB hard drive, it said i had 55GB left, however, with this new harddrive being a slave where would 9gigs go?

 

[Lucky]

I bougt a SATA 160 Gig hard drive and that reports 152 gig. I think it is something to do with the low level formatting done at the manufacturers,and bad sectors etc at manufacture.... I could also be wrong...

 

[jolancer]

u actaully have all the gigs.. in your HD propertyes.. u need to look at the long number in 'bytes' its listed there as 120gigs.

because thy count 1 byte as 1024, instead of 1000. but display the gigs in blabla/1000.

the cluster size also changes the total size after format. default is like 4Kb i think. the higher the cluster size, the less space u end up with after formatting

EDIT: it is sorta a rip to the avage user, cause ther not informed of there 'Magic' formulas. but now u know.

 

[Lone Wolf]

well Windows Xp automatically takes away around 5 gigs. but that isn't enough.

He said it was "...right out of the box, no software were installed on it yet."

EdoKoi, that is normal. They did not short-changed you.

The discrepancy is due to the fact that manufacturers report their size using the binary format whereas windows will report in decimal.

 

[preet2u]

First thing u need to know is ..1MB=1024Kb .. n' not 1000kb..
So according to this .. ur 120Gb should have 1228800Kb.

Normally manufacturers sell the drive as 120GB .. but the have only 120,000,000,000 bytes.. Calculate this n' ur actual size of the drive would be 111.8GB ..

You may also wanna check out this thread which talks about the same thing.

 

[koldapu]

yeah, thats the problem with these manufacturers

even my HP 40gb is 37.25gb

 

[EdoKoi]

hey thanks everyone!

that makes a lot more sense now. ah, i get it!

there is no spoon, just mis-calculations.

now, if i can only find the rest of my socks *scratch head*.

you guys rock!