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Hard Drive Space

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Krisso69   05-04-2007 at 02:42:39 AM

Hi Everyone,

I have just thrown together all my new PC components for my new build. The only problem I'm having so far is I'm missing around 15gb on my 320gb hard drive.

At the initial format/partition section when installing a fresh copy of windows, it shows only 305gb available for formatting, however, BIOS recognizes the drive as 320gb.

Also FYI after the install is complete, windows still indicates 305gb total hard drive volume.

Also FYI I have updated BIOS to the latest revision, the hard drive is a seagate 320gb, and my OS is SP1 edition.

Thanks all!!

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jaguarskx   05-04-2007 at 02:58:02 AM
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The answer is actual simple, but not well known to many people.

Hard drive manufactures uses 1,000 to represent every kilobyte of storage space. But 1 kilobyte actually equals 1,024 (or 2^10).

What this means is that your 320GB hard drive is actually 312.5GB (320GB / 1.024). However, that is the unformatted drive space. Once you format the drive, the format structure (FAT16, FAT32, NTFS) takes up some space as well. In this case the format structure takes up about 7.5GB. That leaves you with 305GB of storage.

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Krisso69   05-04-2007 at 03:05:07 AM
- 0 +

That is totally misleading!!!!

Thanks for the info...

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