overhead or limitation? Seagate 3TB USB EXTERNAL DRIVE

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WacoJohn

WacoJohn

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Seagate 3TB ... intended to be ported from W8.1-64 to W7-64 to W7-32 computers at home.

The drive is partitioned MBR but .. per instructions, using an Acronis driver ... allowing 'full use' of the drive.

At the moment, It is showing 2.51 TB Free of 2.72 TB in Windows Explorer and capacity 2794.52 GB in Disk Management.

Since all numbers exceed 2.2 TB, I figure the difference is DRIVE FORMATTING OVERHEAD and I AM getting FULL capacity. Agree???

Thank you in advance.
 
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M
That sounds about right for a 3TB drive.

Strictly speaking, it should say "2.72TiB" to denote that it's using binary terabytes ("tibibytes", but those names just sound silly to me) rather than decimal terabytes.

Hard disk manufacturers have always used decimal prefixes so 1MB = 1,000,000 bytes, 1GB = 1 billion bytes and 1TB = 1 trillion bytes. Computer operating systems use binary prefixes where 1MiB = 1,048,576 bytes, 1GiB = 1,024MiB and 1TiB = 1,024GiB. They rarely add the "i" to show the difference (it's a relatively new thing, introduced within the last decade or so to help clear up the confusion).

An example from my computer's kernel log:
[ 1.240767] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 250069680 512-byte logical blocks: (128 GB/119 GiB)
Linux...
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M

molletts

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That sounds about right for a 3TB drive.

Strictly speaking, it should say "2.72TiB" to denote that it's using binary terabytes ("tibibytes", but those names just sound silly to me) rather than decimal terabytes.

Hard disk manufacturers have always used decimal prefixes so 1MB = 1,000,000 bytes, 1GB = 1 billion bytes and 1TB = 1 trillion bytes. Computer operating systems use binary prefixes where 1MiB = 1,048,576 bytes, 1GiB = 1,024MiB and 1TiB = 1,024GiB. They rarely add the "i" to show the difference (it's a relatively new thing, introduced within the last decade or so to help clear up the confusion).

An example from my computer's kernel log:
[ 1.240767] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 250069680 512-byte logical blocks: (128 GB/119 GiB)
Linux is, unsurprisingly, being rigorous and reporting both figures for my SSD, which has a capacity of 128,035,676,160 bytes (about 128 billion bytes which agrees with the 128GB value).

(For those who are wondering why there is a separate set of "binary" prefixes and why computers use them instead of just sticking to the "normal" ones, it's to do with the way computers represent numbers internally. We use ten different "symbols" - the digits 0 to 9 - to represent numbers but computers only use two - electrically "off" and electrically "on" which we usually write as 0 and 1 when we have to write out a number in binary form. 1,000 is a nice round number for us in decimal/denary but the closest binary round number is 1,024 which can be written in binary as 100 0000 0000. Just like you can write 1,000 as 10^3 and 1,000,000 as 10^6, you can write 1,024 as 2^10 and 1,048,576 as 2^20.)

Hope this enlightens you a little :)

Stephen
 
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WacoJohn

WacoJohn

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Thank you both for the information. It appears that the answer is YES .. you agree. I also appreciate the extra information .. very educational. I also apologize for the delayed reply .. never was notified my question had been answered.
 
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