just installed new 100gb hard drive, why do i only have 93gb?

Status
Not open for further replies.

glennl

Baseband Member
Messages
78
what gives? is that standard? it comes up as 100,xxx,xxx bytes but shouldn't 100gb be 100gb, not 93? i set it up single partition, no custom formatting or anything... should i have done something different? is it because it's an ATA133 drive and my mobo is ATA100?
 
it's fine.

When you format (NTFS/FAT) the Hard drive "labels" the locations on the disk. this "address" uses up some disk space, hence your HD showing 93 instead of 100. :)

This is probably not the best explanation of what happened, but i hope it helps....
 
I know some space of your hard drives space goes to reserving space for virtual memory as well. Virtual memory is a certain amount of space reserved on your hard drive so that if your ram runs out of room, your computer has a place to put data (you usually want to make sure you have enough ram for the applications you run anyway because using virtual memory makes your computer run slower since pulling and storing data on a hard drive is a lot slower than putting and accessing data in ram.

It reserves 1.5 times the amount of data your ram can store for virtual memory. For example, if you have 512 megabytes of ram, your computer will reserve 768 megabytes for virtual memory on your hard drive.

And also don't forget windows takes up space on the hard drive too.
 
it's a secondary slave drive for extra storage only. i have another drive as the boot drive. so windows is not on this disk. i figured there's some random stuff that needs to be on there, but 7gb seems extreme. what if it was only a 10gb HD, does that mean i'd lose 70% of my space to this random stuff and virtual memory?

i think something's not quite right. 7gb is a lot to be missing...
 
TipsySmile said:
No everythings right, thats how all harddrives are. The manufactures round off the numbers, I have an 80 gig and after installing it, it only showed up as a 75 gig. Just the way they work.

okay... that's okay then. just making sure something wasn't wrong.
 
Also, if you had a 10gig HDD, you'd have like 9.something gigs free.

It's not a constant 7 gigs that is required for the file system. It's just some ratio. A certain amount of space is required for the file system for every gig. I don't know what that number is, though.
 
I thought it was because a GB just wasnt 1,000,000 like it thought that there were other numbers but when labeled manufacturers count 1,000,000 as a GB even though its a bit less.
 
If i can jsut say something totally easy to understand...

Essentially the "rounding numbers" theory is quirte correct.

1024MB = 1GB realistically. But the HDD manufacturers count it like 1000MB = 1GB.

So, thats 24MB per 1GB that you are missing. on a 100GB drive, thats an automatic 2.4GB that you lose.

That's jsut one of the way's HDD manufacturers "rip you off." There are other reasons leading to the eventual ~7GB loss you noticed.

On my "80GB" drive, it's really only 74.5GB MAX. :/
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom