160 GB HDD Issues

G

Guest

Here we go, I recently installed a Secondary Master (Storage).
Seagate 160 GB ATA 7200 , on a Win XP Pro SP2 System. My BIOS recognizes
the full 160 GB. After running the Seagate software, it partitions and
formats the drive, but Windows keeps saying that the drive is unformatted.
Next I try the Disk Management to re-partition, however the max partition
it'll accept 149 GB.

Please help me?????
 
B

Bob Knowlden

What you see is normal: it's a matter of definition.

The disk manufacturers size their drives in a straight decimal manner: 1 GB
= 10e9 bytes. Windows uses 1 GB = 2^30 bytes, or about 1.074 decimal
gigabytes. On that basis, 160 GB decimal becomes 149.

Address scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.
 
G

Guest

That makes sense, however I just had to dump a defective WD Caviar SE Serial
ATA 160 GB Hard Drives ( WD1600JD ). With this one, when I used Windows,
same deal a maximum of 149, but when I used the WD software, I got a total of
160 GB.
 
S

Shenan Stanley

Dayle said:
That makes sense, however I just had to dump a defective WD Caviar SE
Serial ATA 160 GB Hard Drives ( WD1600JD ). With this one, when I
used Windows, same deal a maximum of 149, but when I used the WD
software, I got a total of 160 GB.


This question seems to come up more with 160GB drives than any other. heh

First - here are the REALISTIC numbers:

Advertised --- Actual Capacity
10GB --- 9.31 GB
20GB --- 18.63 GB
30GB --- 27.94 GB
40GB --- 37.25 GB
60GB --- 55.88 GB
80GB --- 74.51 GB
100GB --- 93.13 GB
120GB --- 111.76 GB
160GB --- 149.01 GB
180GB --- 167.64 GB
200GB --- 186.26 GB
250GB --- 232.83 GB

The actual formatted and usable storage area is often less than what is
advertised on the boxes of today's hard disks. It's not that the
manufactures are outright lying, instead they are taking advantage of the
fact that there's no standard set for how to describe a drives storage
capacity.

This results from a definitional difference among the terms kilobyte (K),
megabyte (MB), and gigabyte (GB). In short, here we use the base-two
definition favored by most of the computer industry and used within Windows
itself, whereas hard drive vendors favor the base-10 definitions. With the
base-two definition, a kilobyte equals 1,024 (210) bytes; a megabyte totals
1,048,576 (220) bytes, or 1,024 kilobytes; and a gigabyte equals
1,073,741,824 (230) bytes, or 1,024 megabytes. With the base-10 definition
used by storage companies, a kilobyte equals 1,000 bytes, a megabyte equals
1,000,000 bytes, and a gigabyte equals 1,000,000,000 bytes.

Put another way, to a hard drive manufacturer, a drive that holds 6,400,000
bytes of data holds 6.4GB; to software that uses the base-two definition,
the same drive holds 6GB of data, or 6,104MB.
So, be prepared when you format that new 160GB drive and find only 149GB of
usable storage space. Isn't marketing wonderful?
 
J

jimbo

Dayle said:
That makes sense, however I just had to dump a defective WD Caviar SE Serial
ATA 160 GB Hard Drives ( WD1600JD ). With this one, when I used Windows,
same deal a maximum of 149, but when I used the WD software, I got a total of
160 GB.

:

Sure, WD was reporting the inflated marketing value while Windows was
reporting the true GB value.

jimbo
 

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