Hard Drive Questsion

[coper210]

So I currently have a 750GB Hard Drive in my computer and I am thinking about upgrading to an SSD but I need to know how big of a SSD I need, but when I go to Start Menu>Computer it shows me that I only have 698GB total of Hard Drive space but my Hard Drive is a 750GB, so does the operating system take up that 52GB and windows just doesn't display it?
Thanks!!!

 

[RealBeast]

You are best off with a 120/128Gb SSD or larger, although I have several systems on 80Gb SSDs that contain Win7 and all my programs.

The prices have really come down and they are less than $1/Gb on sale.

Optimized, Windows 7 takes up about half of that 52Gb number. My current SSD has 76Gb including the OS, many programs and games and all my documents.

 

[Dereck47]

Microsoft and memory RAM manufacturers calculate 1 Gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes.

Hard drive and SSD drive manufacturers calculate 1 Gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes.

The difference between the two methods is 7%. 7% of 750 is 52.

So whenever you buy a HDD or SSD there will always be a 7% between what's advertised by the drive and what's available in Windows.

 

[coper210]

Microsoft and memory RAM manufacturers calculate 1 Gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes.

Hard drive and SSD drive manufacturers calculate 1 Gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes.

The difference between the two methods is 7%. 7% of 750 is 52.

So whenever you buy a HDD or SSD there will always be a 7% between what's advertised by the drive and what's available in Windows.

It says that I have 540GB's free of 698GB's so that means that I have taken up 158GB's of space on the hard drive including windows?

 

[RealBeast]

Yup, including all the extra space that Windows consumes for hibernation, paging files, caches/temp files, etc.

 

[Dereck47]

It says that I have 540GB's free of 698GB's so that means that I have taken up 158GB's of space on the hard drive including windows?

Correct. Windows 7 including all of the Service Packs and updates takes from 19-20GB. So the remaining 138GB must be programs/games/media that you installed.

 

[coper210]

Best answer selected by coper210.

 

[mmamuk]

So I currently have a 750GB Hard Drive in my computer and I am thinking about upgrading to an SSD but I need to know how big of a SSD I need, but when I go to Start Menu>Computer it shows me that I only have 698GB total of Hard Drive space but my Hard Drive is a 750GB, so does the operating system take up that 52GB and windows just doesn't display it?
Thanks!!!

The correct answer to your question is given by kenji57_? on:
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Other-External-products/Seagate-expansion-750GB-shows-only-698GB-available-out-of-698GB/td-p/182210

"People count in decimal, computers count in binary.

So we say a Gigabyte is 1000 x 1000 x 1000 Bytes.
750 Gigabytes = 750,000,000,000 Bytes

For a computer 2^10 =1024 = 1kiloByte
and a computer Gigabyte is 1024 x 1024 x 1024 Bytes

so 750,000,000,000 Bytes ÷ 1024 ÷1024 ÷ 1024 = 698 computerGigabytes. Your drive still holds 750,000,000,000 Bytes, but your computer calls that 698GB"