Hard drive new 250 GB Question

[ghowthoo]

Hey,

I just got a new WD 250 gig hard drive and was just wondering if this is normal to loose so much space.

I partitioned and formated the drive and the total space on it says its 232 Gigs, (239 gigs but 8 gigs was used for partition).

I was just wanted to make sure that missing 11 gigs is fairly common since you dont really exactly get for certain the total.

anyway thank you for any help!

 

[RicoDirenzo]

It is correct. 1048 bytes per megabye storage. Take the 250 gig and divide it by 1.048 bytes x 250 gigs = 239 (more or less). Drive manufacturers usually report drive capacity in millions of bytes, whereas your BIOS and FDISK usually report the capacity in megabytes. One megabyte equals 1,048,576 bytes (or 1,024K, wherein each kilobyte is 1,048 bytes). So the bottom line is that this 2500M drive also is a 238.5gig drive! What is really confusing is that there is no industry-wide accepted way of differentiating binary Megabytes from decimal ones. Officially they are both abbreviated as M, so it is often hard to figure which one is being reported. Usually drive manufacturers will always report metric megabytes, since they result in larger, more impressive sounding numbers!
I know, now you have a headache!!!

Update: I even confused myself! LOL (not really)



Math: Given 1 megabyte = 1048 bytes. So divide the 250 gigs by 1048 = 238.5 Still painful!!! but the 8 mg cashe is actually
7.63gigs...enough!!!

 

[ghowthoo]

Hello!

hahaha, it completely made sense, thank you soooo much for the reply, it really cleared it all up!

Best wishes,

gw

 

[Nitestick]

damn lazy scientists stealing metric prefixes for binary well it does make life easier