richard.g

i recently purchased a asus laptop computer the specs are 250 gb harddrive 2.0 ghz intel centrino core2 prossecesor , 4 gb ram, vista 64bit but i noticed when i got home that when i looked in computer it only read that i have 222gb so i took it back to bestbuy and they said that windows was using the rest for the operating system so i left it at that but was still a little skeptable so as i got a little more familure with vista i got to looking around and went to disk management and noticed that my harddrive is partitioned and windows is only using 10.74gb and my total harddrive space is 232.88 so that started my curiousity back up because im missing 17.12 gb i have an external harddrive that i know is 120gb and when i plug it in it only reads as 111 so i did a little research and came across a program called treesize and run that and it says i have 152 free of 222 and says im using 56 gb on my harddrive right now so where is the other 14 gb is there something i dont know about harddrive space or could i have gotten a bad harddrive
one more thing in disk management it says my disks are healthy

raptor_pa

Two issues, the capacity of a drive is unformated capacity. Some of the drive surface is lost. Also the way capacity is actually calculated. Even tho we think of a kilobyte as 1000 bytes it is actually 1024 bytes and a mega byte is not 1000 kilobytes but actually 1024 kilobytes and so on... so it all depends on how the capacity is calculated on the label, compared to how it is actually used and calculated by the system. The numbers sound right tho... no capacity missing... Most of it is marketing smoke and mirrors - it should be called a 250 Billion Byte drive - it is calculated using the 1000 not the 1024 numbers( considerably less than the number of bytes in 250 Gigabytes - which is actually 268,435,456,000 ) - looking at it at the byte level, it is correct though, just mislabeled... :)

richard.g

very useful information thank you and very well explained