Disk Space in C Drive

[Manikandan S]

I am using XP Professioanl with SP3. My total disk space in c drive is not
equal to the Total size - Free spave which was shown in my computer. There is
a difference of 8 GB in this. I had 80GB HDD.

 

[Gordon]

I am using XP Professioanl with SP3. My total disk space in c drive is not
equal to the Total size - Free spave which was shown in my computer. There
is
a difference of 8 GB in this. I had 80GB HDD.

Page file, Hibernation file, System Restore file, also an advertised 80 GB
HDD will NOT contain 80 GB. More like 74.5 after formatting...

 

[R. McCarty]

How did you determine the space discrepancy ? Usually you can Right
Click the drive in Explorer and left click Properties. Explorer will show
both the Used Space and Free Space to equal the total volume size.

There is always be a difference between used space and size on disk.
Files & Folders use clusters to hold data and there is always cluster slack
space that is empty portions of a cluster used to hold a file. If you have
the standard 4-KByte clusters and a file of 2-KBytes then the cluster
that holds the file has a 50% slack space. The larger the Cluster size the
greater the Slack Space for each cluster. ( Unless the data is very large ).

 

[Bob I]

That 80 GB is UNformated and expressed in decimal which is not what you
see after formatting and measuring in binary.

 

[Tim Slattery]

That 80 GB is UNformated and expressed in decimal which is not what you
see after formatting and measuring in binary.

True. Manufacturers give the size in decimal units, so that 80GB =
80,000,000,000. The OS will give the size in binary units, in which
1GB = 2**30 = 1,073,741,824. That makes 80GB(decimal) work out to
74.51 GB (binary).