hard disk capacity

[chooken]

hi,

i just recently bought a wetern digital 120gb with 8mb cache har disk. i plan on using it as an extra hard drive where i can store my mp3s and other stuff.

my problem is that i installed it today and i partitioned it but xp says that the maximum space on the hard disk is 111gb. so what happened to the other 9gb? i havn't installed any operating systems on it. so why can't i use the full 120gb capcacity?

another question what does the 8mb cache do? like does it make copying files faster?

thanks

 

[Demalii]

i forgot exactly.. the term, i think it's something like that's what it's sold as, but when you take 120gigabytes, that's the disk size, the size rounds to 111 erm... whatever, it's normal for that! i promiss!

 

[Shrapnill]

ya greedy bastich! (jokin)

Every hard drive is under its maximum capacity. Always. Mine reads at 117 no matter what.

Anyway, the cache makes accessing "recent" data faster.

 

[chooken]

okay cool then thanks for clearing that up

 

[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 ..

Got it

 

[tech4hire]

I have 3 of the same drive. And the Grand Total comes out to. 333gb. Yes as every one is saying there is nothing wrong except some marketing schemes.

 

[ekÆsine]

actually you guys are half right, somebody tried calculating the 1000MB vs 1024MB rule and we found there are still missing some space after this. it was found after the fact that windows steals some of this drive space for itself and hides this allocated space from the user.

 

[preet2u]

ekÆsine .. I disagree .. this is not a windows issue .. even the size reported by the bios would not be the same ..

It's not OS dependant at all ..
The explanation i gave earlier is correct .. Trust me on this one mate
Peace

 

[T1junkie]

I have a 80GB Maxtor HDD
and it formats to 76GB
I think it has somthing to do with NTFS
cus with a fat32 I had a little more space...

 

[Turbo-Athlon5]

formatting makes your drive a little smaller than it is, this occures on ALL hdds, on small harddrives such as my 20gb maxtor i get .5gb robbed from me. on large hdd like 120gb u get 9gb robbed from u.

they market one thing, but when u format u get less. cant believe u didnt know that.