external hard drive questions

[wallstreetjourn2]

I have a couple questions about an external hard drive that I purchased. It is an Iomega - Prestige 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive. The first question I have is when I boot up my computer with te hard drive already on, my computer won't start -- it said in the manual that there may be some sort of complication, but didn't specify what that complication was, so I was curious why it did that? The correct to this issue was have the hard drive off when you boot up the computer. Then turn it on after the computer finishes loading. It works, but I'd still like to know the technical side of it.

The second question is, the hard drive is 1TB or 1,000 gigabytes of space, but when I mouse over the icon it only lists 932 gigs of space as the total size. I haven't put anything on the hard drive yet. So I'm curious what the space is used for... I'm thinking processing power? But I'm unsure.

 

[Baez]

Your BIOS is most likely set to boot from USB first and hard drive second that is why it won't start.

Hard drives cannot access all of the space physically available. Formatting it in a file system such as NTFS also attributes to the cause. But you must have your drive formatted in some kind of file system. Hard drives are not used to process anything.

 

[Hefemeister]

/for the booting question it is possible your bios is so so that it wants to boot from a usb device prior to your internal harddrive. You can look in bios at the boot order and change that if it is the case. The size shown in windows is correct at 932. You can search the fourms for a thread on it but basically the hard drive manufactures and windows have differnt methods for determining drive space. You never actually get what a manufacturer claims. here is a link Hard drive space usage distribution if you really want to know why.

 

[eyeCpc]

First the problem seen when adding on an external or even another internal drive especially an ide model when you already have only sata drives in is that the list of hard drives not the boot order still set at hard drive first then sees the external drive at the top of that list setting it as the default hard drive.

Once you highlight hard drives in the boot order section and press the enter key on many boards the list is brought up where you move the present boot drive back to the top again. You can also change the default drive there if you dual or multi boot different versions of Windows or other OSs on more then one drive.

The "units of measurement" used by manufacturers to indicate the drive's capacity is based on the physical surface capacity of all platters(round metalic disks inside) in decimal form while Windows and other OSs use the binary form there. Most new users and first time system builders who assemble their own cases ask that exact question since it throws everyone off at first! A 500gb drive sees about 465gb available while looking at the properties while in Windows.

When going to buy a drive one useful tool is a capacity conversion calculator seen at The Tomorrow Times: The Hard Drive Capacity Calculator

You simply enter the decimal capacity for the drive and look at the results directly below in binary.