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.
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.
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%!
Message edited by rodney_ws on 07-25-2008 at 06:33:44 PM
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...
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.
---------------
Evil lurks in the databanks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..."
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