New Hard Drive

[phone33]

I just bought a new WD 640 Gig hard drive and I don't know if I did something wrong but I had to format it with NTFS to make my vista see it. However after I formated the drive vista only saw 590 gigs, Did NTFS eat 50 Gigs? Also my vista is installed on my old slow smaller drive that is almost full. How can i move my programs and documents to my new drive without messing up my machine? I fell like if I just drag and drop my program files directory bad things would happen.

 

[runswindows95]

Formatting generally takes around 10% of the drive. So, yeah, reporting as 590GB is normal. Far as moving files, I say drag all your data to the 640GB and just use the other one as the OS/programs drive. The only way to get programs on the 640GB is to reinstall them, but I don't suggest that because if you have to wipe out Vista, you will have to reinstall all the programs anyway.

 

[UncleDave]

The only thing you have lost is to marketing. Drive manufacturers sell 1,000,000,000,000Bytes as 1 TB instead of 1,099,511,627,776Bytes which is a true 1GB.

One Kilobyte = 1024Bytes
One Megabyte = 1024Kb = 1,048,576Bytes
One Gigabyte = 1024Mb = 1,073,741,824Bytes
One Terabyte = 1024Gb = 1,099,511,627,776Bytes


If you take your 640 000 000 000Byte drive (640 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000) then divide by 1024 then by 1024 then by 1024 you get 596.04644775390625GB.

Bad things will happen if you just copy them, you'll do better to un-install then reinstall your apps on the new drive. You could also image the old drive and move the image to the new drive.

UD.

 

[firemist]

Clone the old drive to the new one using a tool like Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost. Then make the new one your boot drive and you won't have to do anything else. You can then wipe the old drive and use it for storage.

 

[aevm]

The only thing you have lost is to marketing. Drive manufacturers sell 1,000,000,000,000Bytes as 1 TB instead of 1,099,511,627,776Bytes which is a true 1GB.

If you take your 640 000 000 000Byte drive (640 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000) then divide by 1024 then by 1024 then by 1024 you get 596.04644775390625GB.

True. Western Digital was sued for false advertising several years ago because of this. They settled. The settlement went like this: WD is allowed to continue the practice, and every customer who bought a WD disk (from a certain list of models) gets a link to download some software for free. I happened to qualify so I used the link and got the software. WD claimed it was a $35 value. I threw it out without installing it. It was some backup program, the sort you get for free with DVD burners.

 

[phone33]

Thanks! im sad to see my 50 gigs go but it is nice to hear the problem is with the hard drive addvertising and not me. I will try some of the imaging stuff this weekend. Thanks again!

 

[cjl]

It's simply the difference between binary and decimal reporting of size. All hard drive manufacturers do it, and as a result, a 250GB drive = 232, a 750 is actually 697, etc. Basically, according to hard drive manufacturers, 1 kilobyte = 1000 bytes, 1 megabyte = 1000 kilobytes, etc, while for the OS, 1 kilobyte = 2^10 bytes, 1 megabyte = 2^20 bytes, etc. This also causes the 2 values to diverge as the size gets larger - a binary gigabyte is farther off of a decimal gigabyte (percentage wise) than a binary megabyte is compared to a decimal megabyte. This is also why it has only really been noticed recently.

 

[Paperdoc]

The only thing you have lost is to marketing. Drive manufacturers sell 1,000,000,000,000Bytes as 1 TB instead of 1,099,511,627,776Bytes which is a true 1GB.

One Kilobyte = 1024Bytes
One Megabyte = 1024Kb = 1,048,576Bytes
One Gigabyte = 1024Mb = 1,073,741,824Bytes
One Terabyte = 1024Gb = 1,099,511,627,776Bytes


If you take your 640 000 000 000Byte drive (640 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000) then divide by 1024 then by 1024 then by 1024 you get 596.04644775390625GB.
UD.

I gonna disagree a little. The definition of the prefix "Giga" is one billion, or 1000 x 1000 x 1000, and that is what HDD makers use. It is computer software developers, including Microsoft, who decided long ago to simplify their jobs by approximating "Kilo" as 1024 instead of 1000. But by being consistent and extending this approach, we end up with "Giga" and "Tera" being as Uncle Dave says. Personally I don't consider that unjustified marketing hype by HDD makers; to me it's the digital thinking of software designers that caused this. Either way, the bottom line is you are NOT losing any space. You are just being confused by having two groups use the same word (Gigabyte) to mean different things.

 

[bobbknight]

All the drive makers were sued over the drive size arithmetic, the only people who made out were the lawyers.

 

[aevm]

And that's how we ended up with weird things like the gibibyte
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiB