hard drive size question

[mwebsurfer]

I have 4 WD SATA 250GB hard drives in my pc. THe drive with my system
files is partitioned into 2 parts and the other 3 drives are mounted as
dynamic drives of 250GB each. However, all drives showed up as 232.4 GB
after formatting. I know of the different notations for drives by XPPro
and the drive manufacturer but this doesn't account for the differences
in size for these drives. Can anyone advise what is happening and if
there is a way to get back the lost capacity? Any help would be
appreciated.

 

[VanShania]

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[Clint]

Actually, it works out almost perfectly. 250,000,000,000 (250 decimal GB) =
232.83 real GB. Divide by 1,073,741,824 (1024*1024*1024) to convert.

Clint

 

[DaveW]

250 GB is the UNformatted capacity of the drives. Formatting takes up space
and leaves you correctly with 232 GB per drive of useable space.

 

[Clint]

I think it's the conversion from marketing GB to real GB that causes the
difference. There's some overhead for formatting, but by far the biggest
hit is the conversion.

Clint

 

[Rod Speed]

I think it's the conversion from marketing GB to real GB that causes the difference. There's some
overhead for formatting, but by far the biggest hit is the conversion.

Yes, but it isnt 'marketing GB', that's the SI standard.

And in fact the binary GBs that you are calling 'real'
arent actually 'real' at all. Its really only ram that has
a binary organisation, everything else like cpu speed,
drive sizes etc should be using the decimal GBs.

And the 1.44MB floppy is in fact a weird binary/decimal hybrid.

 

[Clint]

I sit corrected... Thanks for the clarification.

Clint