71.7Mb used after formatting SATA drive?

[arossphoto]

I just bought a 250GB Seagate SATA drive and an external enclosure. While I was setting it up and formatting for the first time, the power cable came loose and it lost power. I powered it up again, reformated and it's finished. However, in the drive properties it says there are 71.7MB used and 232GB free out of 249,981,456,384 bytes. If there are 232 free out of almost 250 it sounds like I'm using 18GB. It all looks a bit weird.

Does any of this sound normal? Is there anything else I should be doing before I put this drive into service? I'm running WinXP Pro.

Thanks,

Andrew

 

[Nitestick]

you are not using 18gb at all. 232GiB is the actual capacity of a "250GB" drive. the manufacturers are sneaky and define a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes when it is actually 1,073,741,824 bytes. put 250,000,000,000/1,073,741,824 in a calculator and see what you get.

 

[arossphoto]

Thanks very much. I did not know that. So I guess the 71.7MB that's being used is normal and reserved for some function of the drive.

Cheers,

Andrew