stifler

hi guys,
after sorting out my 200gb hard drive to display the max 186gb.. i dont understand what the controller card is really doing, because i carred out a little experiment.
i connected the hard drive straight to the mobo, an when i switched it on, i still say that my har drive was still displaying 186gb in windows xp?

the only reason i bought the controller card was because i thought that allowed the hard drive to show the full capacity, but i just discovered if i plug my hard drive still into the mobo, it does the same thing..

so in my opinion, what is the point in me having a promise 133tx2 controller card..
i just feel like selling it now..

ps: what is RAID, what does it do, and what is it used for...

really confused with these controller cards, havent a slightest clue, what they are about...

timk9

Hi stifler. Your drive shows a 186GB *formatted* capacity. Drive vendors like to use nice round numbers like 200gb for advertising purposes. It is 200gb unformatted, as there is always some overhead, different amounts for different operating systems (NTFS used by WinXP is very efficient by the way).

I haven't looked up that particular model of Promise controller card, but the simple answer is that you don't need it if you only have one drive and are able to plug right into your motherboard. You would need a hard drive controller card if you've run out of connectors on the mobo's built-in controller. Or if you want RAID, which answers your next question.

RAID is "redundant array of independent disks", which allows you to use multiple drives in an array which is recognized by Windows as a single disk. The purpose is for redundancy (backup) or striping (speed), or both.

Hope this helps.
Tim

UncleMacro

I wonder if you're getting confused by the difference between marketing gigabytes and real gigabytes. The definition of "gigabyte" depends on who you're talking to. To hard disk marketing people "giga" means 1,000,000,000. Computer people use the binary version of "giga" which is 2 to the 32 or 1,073,741,824. So what is sold as a 200 gigabyte hard disk contains approximately 200 X 1,000,000,000 bytes. Windows uses the binary version of giga so when it reports a 186 gigabyte disk, what you actually have is 186 X 1,073,741,824 which is just a little short of 200,000,000,000. So when you buy a hard disk which says 200 gigabytes on the box, Windows will report it as 186 gigabytes because of the difference in the definitions of "giga". By the way, since we're talking about gigabytes, Windows is right and the hard disk marketing people are wrong. Marketing people use the decimal version of "giga" to make the hard disks sound bigger.

timk9

Yes thanks for the addition. I knew that but didn't think to mention it. There is indeed an overhead caused by formatting, but not 14 gigs worth :-)

tim

bnm81002

my Seagate 200GB hard drive also shows 186GB capacity running Windows XP as well as it has been formatted, so it is indeed less than what is advertised because of the formatting of the drive