Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general (
More info?)
In news:4709D987-E28F-4A61-BCC2-B877F68EE7E4@microsoft.com,
pyewacket <pyewacket@discussions.microsoft.com> typed:
> i have a 6 gig hard drive but windows is telling me i have
> only
> 968MB left .i have run check disc all ok.when i count the total
> of
> all files and folders including hidden ones in this drive it
> come to
> 2.76GB. .has any one see my missing 2.34GB ???can you all look
> down
> the back of your sofas or in your pockets!
There are two different issues at work here:
First, you don't have a 6GB drive, but a 5.58GB drive. All hard
drive manufacturers define 1GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes, while the
rest of the computer world, including Windows, defines it as 2 to
the 30th power (1,073,741,824) bytes. So a 6 billion byte drive
is actually about 5.58GB.
Some people point out that the official international standard
defines the "G" of GB as one billion, not 1,073,741,824. Correct
though they are, using the binary value of GB is so well
established in the computer world that I consider using the
decimal value of a billion to be deceptive marketing.
So you are missing less than you think you are.
Second, space is allocated on disk drives in units called
clusters. The size of the cluster varies with the file system,
and sometimes with the size of the partition.
Your cluster size is probably 4K. That means that every file
between 1 byte and 4096 bytes (size) uses one cluster, 4096 bytes
(size on disk). Every file between 4097 bytes and 8192 bytes uses
two clusters, 8192 bytes, and so on.
The difference between the size and the size on disk is called
"cluster overhang" or "slack," and that's what accounts for the
rest of the difference in the two numbers.
--
Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
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