Hard Drive size duduction

[random guy]

i just bought one of these

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148134

it is supposed to be 750gigs but when i formated it with norton partition magic it gave me 700gb capacity with 680 gigs of usable space (23 gigs being used even though no files on it)

then i went to linux and used gparted which was a little better, i got me 700gb capactiy with almost all of it free (like 100mb used)

i tried formating both ext3 and fat32 on both operating systems.

i am used to the actual capacity being smaller than the rated capacity but 50gb seems like a lot to be missing.

comments? should i claim it as a bad one and ask for replacement? i havent put any data on it yet so that if i was going to return it there would be no personal information recoverable.

 

[jrnyfan]

you have never bought a 750GB before have you? my 250GB shows 221GB available so trend that out

 

[MadHacker]

750gigs = 750,000,000,000

700gb = 1024 mb, where mb is 1024 kb, where kb is 1024 bytes.
as to the 23gigs being used with no files on it , the OS reservers that for directory structure and stuff.

 

[rodney_ws]

It's because of the way different people calculate what a gigabyte is. The manufacturers will say "Well, that's a 750 GB drive because it has 750,000,000,000 bytes of avaiable storage." Ok, but a GB is in fact 1073741824 bytes (1024 X 1024 X 1024) So Windows reports available space according to actual gigabytes while the manufactures just use 1,000,000,000 bytes to represent a gigabyte.

That means there is around a 7% difference between what the manufacturers say and what an operating system will report... and that's pretty much explains your difference between 750 GB and 700 GB. That 7%!

 

[aevm]

Normally, what they sell as 750GB should have 750,000,000,000 bytes, which is in fact 698 GB (1 GB = 1024*1024*1024 bytes). 680GB sounds a bit too low, yeah...

 

[aevm]

LOL, everybody explained it at the same time

 

[sailer]

Just be happy that you got all those gigabytes at a decent price. I can remember the first gigabyte hard drive I bought. It had 1 gigabyte and cost about $100. Yes, $1 per megabyte. Could you see spending $750 for a 750 gigabyte drive? OK, I've been around awhile. I can remember spending nearly $2000 for a decked out Commodore 64 and a monitor that displayed a whole 16 colors. And the best games were a whole 32 kilobytes in size. Forget the "good, old days". The good days are now.

 

[pcgamer12]

Wow, I just learned something today, thanks everyone.
The formula works, my 160GB x 93.13% = 149GB which Vista reports my 160GB as.

 

[rozar]

The decimal to binary conversion number is 1.073741824 (for GB)

750/1.073741824=698.491931

Keep in mind that your hard drive may not be "exactly" 750gb. But it will be very close.

 

[pcgamer12]

You can paste numbers into Vista's Calculator. HAHAHAHAH!

I wonder if it works in XP..

The 1.073741824 binary conversion number also works.

 

[pbrigido]

You will typically lose 10% - 15% of your HD total capacity after it is formatted. When I say lose, I don't mean that is disappears from your HD. It just means that the file system you have chosen has to use a certain amount and that amount is not accessible to you in Windows.

680GB sounds to be right on. Nothing to worry about.

 

[jaguarskx]

My 1TB hard drives are 931MB.

Get used to it.

 

[fomayin]

While we're talking about hard drive size discrepancies...

Those new "1.0 Terabyte" hard drives... they aren't 1 Terabyte...

A real Terabyte is 1024 real Gigabytes (where a Gigabyte is 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes)

These new drives are 1000 "Gigabytes" where 1 "Gigabyte" is 1000 * 1000 * 1000 bytes.

Basically, this continues the trend, but because of the extra 1000/1024 factor added, you get even farther from the real size. Where hard drives measured in Gigabytes are 7% smaller than advertised, hard drives measured in Terabytes are actually about 10% smaller than advertised. A 1.0 "Terabyte" Hard drive is actually 931GB or 0.909TB, a shortage of 93GB. It's getting worse.

Just wait, when we get to 1.0PB (petabyte = 1024TB), the mislabeling will grow to 11.2% and 1 1.0PB drive will be "only" 0.888PB, a 114TB shortage.

 

[MadHacker]

While we're talking about hard drive size discrepancies...

Those new "1.0 Terabyte" hard drives... they aren't 1 Terabyte...

A real Terabyte is 1024 real Gigabytes (where a Gigabyte is 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes)

These new drives are 1000 "Gigabytes" where 1 "Gigabyte" is 1000 * 1000 * 1000 bytes.

Basically, this continues the trend, but because of the extra 1000/1024 factor added, you get even farther from the real size. Where hard drives measured in Gigabytes are 7% smaller than advertised, hard drives measured in Terabytes are actually about 10% smaller than advertised. A 1.0 "Terabyte" Hard drive is actually 931GB or 0.909TB, a shortage of 93GB. It's getting worse.

Just wait, when we get to 1.0PB (petabyte = 1024TB), the mislabeling will grow to 11.2% and 1 1.0PB drive will be "only" 0.888PB, a 114TB shortage.

so if we go 1 Km/h we are actualy going 1024 m/h?
don't think so...
Kilo is 1,000
Mega is 1,000,000
Giga is 1,000,000
Tera is 1,000,000,000
we just use 1024 because it is easier for computers to calculate that way.

 

[random guy]

ok i see, now i feel lied to lol.

ya i always was annoyed that manufactuers dont use binary values instead of decimal values (thats what i call them since the binary system has kilobyte as 1024 and decimal system uses kilo* as 1000 units)

alright then i guess i am all fine with my 700gig ext3 partition. that 50gig gap will be missed. i can only imagine how pissed people will be when drives increase in size more and that gap grows big time.

thanks for the replies.

 

[cjl]

While we're talking about hard drive size discrepancies...

Those new "1.0 Terabyte" hard drives... they aren't 1 Terabyte...

A real Terabyte is 1024 real Gigabytes (where a Gigabyte is 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes)

These new drives are 1000 "Gigabytes" where 1 "Gigabyte" is 1000 * 1000 * 1000 bytes.

Basically, this continues the trend, but because of the extra 1000/1024 factor added, you get even farther from the real size. Where hard drives measured in Gigabytes are 7% smaller than advertised, hard drives measured in Terabytes are actually about 10% smaller than advertised. A 1.0 "Terabyte" Hard drive is actually 931GB or 0.909TB, a shortage of 93GB. It's getting worse.

Just wait, when we get to 1.0PB (petabyte = 1024TB), the mislabeling will grow to 11.2% and 1 1.0PB drive will be "only" 0.888PB, a 114TB shortage.

As MadHacker said, those prefixes are all decimal prefixes. So, the "real" values should be the decimal values.

Although I guess you could use that excuse when caught speeding...

"But officer, I was only going 100 binary kilometers per hour..."