hard drive disk size?

jon80 · 07-17-2009, 05:15 AM

Dell SATA 250 Gb hdd shows as having the following partitions on Windows Vista:

230Gb on C:
2Gb on D:

Where is the remaining 18Gb?

**manic** · 07-17-2009, 05:25 AM

Nothing wrong with the drive, or the way the operating system is
reporting it. The way the disk size is calculated gets complicated,,for
me at least. Always comes up smaller then it actually is, I guess you
could call it rounding up., Plus after your format, that takes away
space..

whizzyfinger · 07-17-2009, 05:30 AM

It's the way Manufactures caclulate the Gb I'm afraid.

Correctly speaking 1 Gigabyte is 1073741824 bytes

However manufactures of drives have always used the 1 Gigabyte = 1000000000 bytes calculation.

250/1073741824 = 0.000000232

0.000000232 x 1000000000 =232

You have not been conned anymore than manufactures have been conning everyone else

When formated with a file system drives lose a bit more overhead as well, although at this capacity it is minimal.

Wikipedia is a good place to read up on this

"Although most manufacturers of hard disk drives and flash-memory disk devices define 1 gigabyte as 1000000000bytes, the computer operating systems used by most users usually calculate size in gigabytes by dividing the total capacity in bytes (whether it is disk capacity, file size, or system RAM) by 1073741824. This distinction can be a cause of confusion, as a hard disk with a manufacturer-rated capacity of 400 gigabytes may be reported by the operating system as only 372 GB large"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

**raptor_pa** · 07-17-2009, 05:31 AM

It is all in how a GB is defined got a new computer with 500gb and some is missing?

07-17-2009, 05:15 AM	#1 (permalink)
jon80 Registered User Join Date: Dec 2008 Posts: 2 OS: WinXP	hard drive disk size? Dell SATA 250 Gb hdd shows as having the following partitions on Windows Vista: 230Gb on C: 2Gb on D: Where is the remaining 18Gb?

07-17-2009, 05:25 AM	#2 (permalink)
manic Mod Hardware Team Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: Florida Posts: 5,241 OS: xp	Re: hard drive disk size? Nothing wrong with the drive, or the way the operating system is reporting it. The way the disk size is calculated gets complicated,,for me at least. Always comes up smaller then it actually is, I guess you could call it rounding up., Plus after your format, that takes away space.. __________________

07-17-2009, 05:30 AM	#3 (permalink)
whizzyfinger Registered User Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: UK Posts: 44 OS: Windows 2003 server SP2, Xp SP3, Vista SP1, Windows 7 RTM	Re: hard drive disk size? It's the way Manufactures caclulate the Gb I'm afraid. Correctly speaking 1 Gigabyte is 1073741824 bytes However manufactures of drives have always used the 1 Gigabyte = 1000000000 bytes calculation. 250/1073741824 = 0.000000232 0.000000232 x 1000000000 =232 You have not been conned anymore than manufactures have been conning everyone else When formated with a file system drives lose a bit more overhead as well, although at this capacity it is minimal. Wikipedia is a good place to read up on this "Although most manufacturers of hard disk drives and flash-memory disk devices define 1 gigabyte as 1000000000bytes, the computer operating systems used by most users usually calculate size in gigabytes by dividing the total capacity in bytes (whether it is disk capacity, file size, or system RAM) by 1073741824. This distinction can be a cause of confusion, as a hard disk with a manufacturer-rated capacity of 400 gigabytes may be reported by the operating system as only 372 GB large" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

07-17-2009, 05:31 AM	#4 (permalink)
raptor_pa Mod Hardware Team Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: Central PA Posts: 4,821 OS: XP	Re: hard drive disk size? It is all in how a GB is defined got a new computer with 500gb and some is missing? __________________