750 gb drive only 698 gb

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cjman2

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Aug 8, 2014
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I was fixing a driv and i noticed in parted magic my drive is 680 when on the hd its 750. And parted magic is saying i is meant to be 750 and the hd is too small
 
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G
This is completely normal.

To cut a long story short, it's basically a means of false advertising, or false reporting at the very least.
Manufacturers rate storage space based on a certain number of MegaBytes per GigaByte, or Megabits in each Megabyte, Windows tends to read these differently.
On top of that, some small portion can be reserved or outright taken after formatting for other purposes.

To give you an idea, the two 1TB drives in my system reported returns of 931GB usable space after the initial format. It happens on every drive, at every size point. Including SSDs. The greater the capacity, the larger the percentage drop.
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This is completely normal.

To cut a long story short, it's basically a means of false advertising, or false reporting at the very least.
Manufacturers rate storage space based on a certain number of MegaBytes per GigaByte, or Megabits in each Megabyte, Windows tends to read these differently.
On top of that, some small portion can be reserved or outright taken after formatting for other purposes.

To give you an idea, the two 1TB drives in my system reported returns of 931GB usable space after the initial format. It happens on every drive, at every size point. Including SSDs. The greater the capacity, the larger the percentage drop.
 
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ronintexas

ronintexas

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Dec 10, 2012
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You never get the "full amount" of a hard drive - the manufacturer of a hard drive measures the drive capacity in actual bytes - not GB.....here is the formula:

698GB = 714,752 MB = 731,906,048 KB = 749,471,793,152 B

749,471,793,152 Bytes = 750GB by the manufacturer, but in actual GB, it is 698.
 
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dgingeri

dgingeri

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Dec 4, 2009
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Yeah, that is the different in counting binary compared to decimal.

In decimal, the way the drive manufacturers count, it is ~750,000,000,000 bytes.

In binary, the way to OS counts, each order of magnitude is 1024 instead of 1000, so 750,000,000,000/1024 = 732,421,875 kB, then 732,421,875/1024 = 715,255 MB, and then 715,255/1024 = 698GB.

The OS and the drive manufacturers count gigabytes differently. Technically, the OS is counting GiB, not GB.

(The drive manufacturers already won a class action lawsuit over this disparity years ago. You're not going to win any lawsuits against them over false advertising. So, don't try.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
 
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MDGaspesie

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Most manufacturers now write somewhere in small caracters that 1MB = 1 000 000 bytes for marketing or I don't really why they do this because to your computer, 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes

So if your 750GB drive has 750 000 000 marketing bytes, it means your drive actually has 698GB, take away some for boot partition/EFI but this is basically why your computer says diffently than what is written on the drive
 
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cjman2

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Aug 8, 2014
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But parted magic says that the hd is meant to be 750 gb
And the hd is a western digital wd7500aacs
 
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InvalidError

InvalidError

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It is technically not false advertising: kilo/mega/giga/etc. are prefixes defined in the metric system and drive manufacturers are using the correct official definition.

Software writers on the other hand had a long tradition of using powers of 1024 instead of 1000 because they are far more convenient and a close enough approximation for most everyday uses and adopted the metric prefixes' names to represent those base-1024 prefixes.

I'm still scratching my head about how HDD manufacturers lost that class-action lawsuit about drive capacity... guess they failed to convince the judges that the metric system is an international standard that precedes programmers' adoption and misuse of metric prefixes.
 
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G

Guest

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Probably just reading some stat held somewhere on the drive.
Actual space and usable space are very different. Some users above have posted how the OS calculates storage on your drive.

698GB is all you're going to get out of that drive dude.
 
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G

Guest

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That's interesting, I had always assumed the blame fell on the manufacturers side.

Guess I've got some reading up to do! Thanks dude.
 
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