Hard Drive

[Bill]

Ok, I have 2 questions....I have 2 hard drives, the 1st (primary) is a
Western Digital almost 10GB, and the second (just added 2 days ago) Western
digital 120GB. The thing is, and i undrstand there is overhead (not sure I
understand it, but I know it exists with all hard drives) but windows reads
the capacity of the smaller drive (from disk management or the drive's
property page) as 9.31GB while Western Digital's DLG utility reads it's
capacity as 9.77 GB..and Belarc Advisor read it as 9.99GB, the second drive
windows sees as a capacity of 111GB and WD's utility sees it as 117.22GB and
Belarc reads as 120.03GB....Can anyone help out with what's going on here?

2nd question, I thought I read somewhere that having 2 hard drives if one
were to place the page file on the 2nd drive, the one the system is not
installed on, that Windows' performance will improve or something like that.
Can anyone enlighten me on this?

TIA
Bill

--

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi Bill,

Multipe pagefiles aren't a bad thing, and placing it on the secondary drive
may improve performance *if* it is frequently used and the drive is up to
speed when it is called on. Experiment a bit to see what works for you. You
can change the pagefile location in the Control Panel/System/Advanced
tab/Performance settings/advanced tab/change.

As to the drive readings, a drive manufacturer calls 1GB as 1,000,000,000
bytes, so a 120GB drive is 120,000,000,000 bytes. Windows calls 1GB as
1024x1024x1024 bytes or 1,074,741,824 bytes. So it sees 120GB as
120,000,000,000/1,074,741,824 or 111.65GB. It's all math and partition
alignment (there is always some wasted space at either end), which accounts
for the small variances reported between the disk utilities. Some are only
reading the amount of disk space used by the partition, some counting all
available space on the drive.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers aka "Nutcase" MS-MVP - Win9x
Windows isn't rocket science! That's my other hobby!

Associate Expert - WinXP - Expert Zone

 

[Alex Nichol]

Ok, I have 2 questions....I have 2 hard drives, the 1st (primary) is a
Western Digital almost 10GB, and the second (just added 2 days ago) Western
digital 120GB. The thing is, and i undrstand there is overhead (not sure I
understand it, but I know it exists with all hard drives) but windows reads
the capacity of the smaller drive (from disk management or the drive's
property page) as 9.31GB while Western Digital's DLG utility reads it's
capacity as 9.77 GB..and Belarc Advisor read it as 9.99GB,

Makers describe their disks in GB - billions of bytes, decimal, usually
rounded off.

Computer people, for convenience, measure disk space (and RAM) in a
binary equivalent;
1K = 1024
1M = 1024 K = 1048576
1G = 1024 M = 1073741824 so a factor of 1.0737. . . to the decimal

so '120 billion' is 111.75 binary G; and 10 billion is 9.31binary

and some make mixes - WD's DLG is probably using 'millions of K' - as
the matter starts with the 512 byte 'half K' size of an actual
formatted sector.