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Hello,
my hardrive is supposed to be 250 gb, but on my C: it only shows 233 gb. I only have one partition and i tried creating a second using "Partition Magic" but it shows only "7.5mb unallocated". Why is it that i am missing 17 gb, what could be the problem?
Well, when manufactures write "200 GB", they aren't doing the math properly, as the computer is...at least, that's MY take on it. Others may disagree, but...
You know a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, not 1000, right?
So, dived 250,000,000 (total KB) by 1024 (1 MB expressed in bytes), and you get 244140.625. So you have a ~244,140 megabyte drive. That's still a big number.
Now take your 244,140 (total MB) and divide by 1024 again (1 GB expressed in MB), and you get 238.4185791015625. So you have a ~238 GB drive.
Windows versions will format drives with different block sizes, which changes how efficiently it uses the space. That accounts for the 7.5 MB and any discrepancies above, too. ;)
Seriously...this is why you are getting the numbers in question. I recently bought a very nice Seagate 160 GB hard drive, and broke it up into 4 partitions. Below is my size, and what windows reports (in parentheses)
C: 10 GB (9.99)
M: 50 GB (49.9)
N: 50 GB (49.9)
O: 39 GB (39) <- largest it would allow, using all remaining space
Add those up, and tell me where my 10 GB went, darnit! :P
We feel your pain.
And let's not forget that other scam: hidden partitions!
In stead of spending half a dollar to manufacture a recovery CD, some manufacturers hijack part of the hard drive and turn it into a recovery partition...
My HP has a 10GB "recovery partition" (that should give you an idea about how much other crap they put on there)... that's 10GB less hard drive space (the thing was advertized as having 100GB - the 1,000/1,024 scam plus the hidden partition scam combined leaves me with around 80GB...)
There is no problem, You dont actually get the full size.... It takes that mount of room to format and partition the drive... 233 is AS BIG AS IT WILL GET.. have fun!
As zencoder said..
It's a fraud of HDD manuefacturers that has been going on for ages..
Counting GB's can be done in a number of ways..
There is the scientiffically correct way.. and there is the cheap ass consumer-fusckers way..
:( i dont like missing 17 gb. If i reformat my computer, do you suppose my memory will go up by a bit?
No, I am pretty sure that it won't. This box has two 80Gb drives, but they only show as 76. As already explained, there are reasons for this. The main one is that the drive manufacturers use 1000 instead of 1024 and go to the nearest round number for marketing purposes.Quote:
If i reformat my computer, do you suppose my memory will go up by a bit?
;)
Question: In legal terms wouldn't that be considered as false advertisement; advertising 40gb when they really offer less?
Hi Raion ,
Interesting point, but I guess that it is the "industry standard" and they all do it?
:(
Also doesn't it have to do with whatever filesystem/OS you are using? They all have their strengths/weaknesses for how they break up the physical disk, how much they use for their file/table structure, etc (consider it overhead)...
For example, in a windows file system, it basically stores files on the cluster level if memory serves (clusters of sectors) with each sector being a set size (that is somewhat configurable). Anyway, where this could be a problem is say if your cluster size is 4k and sector size is 1k, what happens when your file is say 5k...you get slack space of 3k (unused sectors in the cluster) that can't be used. Where this can be a serious problem is if you have alot of very small files (1k for example), you can get alot of wasted disk space...regardless the point was that it can also lead to discrepancies of what is reported as 'space free to write'...
So that loose space, aside from recovery partitions, is comprised of space needed by the filesystem to track locations of files (and other information like modify/access/create times) and slack space and various ineffeciencies of representing physical disk address space logically...
Or at least I think that is how I remember it :)