500 Gb HD formats @ 7% less than advertised...

[spectre827]

I purchased a WD 500Gb SATA II HD, installed it, formatted it through Drive Manager in XP and it shows up as only 465Gb... Does the drive have approximately 7% dead space (unusable sectors)?

 

[Can Not]

No, the drive always had 465GB, drive manufacturers just measure it differently to inflate the GBs.

 

[caqde]

I purchased a WD 500Gb SATA II HD, installed it, formatted it through Drive Manager in XP and it shows up as only 465Gb... Does the drive have approximately 7% dead space (unusable sectors)?

That is the Correct size..

A Hard Drives Size is measured in Metric KB = 1,000 etc. Computers Measure in Binary Metric mix where a KB = 1024 so in accordance 500,000,000,000 Bytes = 465.61GB in Binary Metric or as they are now calling it 465.61GiB (I think...)

So it should be around 465.61GB and as I can see it is. So your fine you got what you paid for...

 

[Evilonigiri]

Let me expand on that.
1024 bytes = 1kilobytes
1024 kilobytes = 1megabytes
1024megabytes = 1gigabytes

So?
1gigabytes = 1073741824bytes

Which means...
465gigabytes = 499289948160bytes

499289948160bytes LOOKS like 500gigabytes. I call that the "slang" way of representing them.

 

[spectre827]

Thank you very much

You all Rock!!!

 

[chookman]

Im suprised we dont see this question more often...

My latest run in with this is my new RAID 5. 5x500GB WD harddrives, in RAID 5 i will get 2Tb how cool, of course i knew about the conversion loss so i expected a bit. Array shows as 1.81Tb so i loose 190gb thats the size of most peoples hard drives lol.

 

[GeorgeH]

Actually a WD 500GB hard drive shows up (in properties) as 500,106,254,576 bytes. A bit over 500 billion bytes - the manufacturer's 500GB.

 

[caqde]

Actually a WD 500GB hard drive shows up (in properties) as 500,106,254,576 bytes. A bit over 500 billion bytes - the manufacturer's 500GB.

Well that may not be true of all 500GB hard drives and may not even be true of all 500GB WD hard drives I would say to be accurate it is usually 500,000,000,000 bytes +- some % of bytes usually in the + range though.

 

[thehelo]

yeah. it sucks that HD manufacturers do this, but it is something they all do, and its been in practice for a long time.

 

[GeorgeH]

caqde ---

My point is/was that the bytes are there.

The operating system may consume some as overhead and may report a lower number but those are problems caused by the operating system and for the operating system to correct not by a lie on the part of the manufacturer.

 

[ethel]

oh man i've seen this question in these forums so often

 

[caqde]

caqde ---

My point is/was that the bytes are there.

The operating system may consume some as overhead and may report a lower number but those are problems caused by the operating system and for the operating system to correct not by a lie on the part of the manufacturer.

Even so the drive still has less space than what Windows would call 500GB before it is even formatted. The overhead of the File system and the partition table is much less than 7% of the drive although 7% is the difference between 1GiB and 1GB though. 1,000,000,000 (GB) vs 1,073,742,824 (GiB) respectively in bytes. Although that loss in data is certainly a factor in this matter it is not the largest factor in this matter, but it used to be though when drives were still measured in MB.

Loss in % compared to Unit of measure

KB = 2.4% (Exact) Kilo-byte
MB = ~4.9% (Rounded up) Mega-byte
GB = ~7.4% (Rounded up) Giga-byte
TB = ~10% (Rounded up) Tera-byte
PB = ~12.6% (Rounded up) Peta-byte

Yeah this is what we get to look forward to.