hardrive capacity

[Thendric]

Hi thanks for any help

My question is i have a 160 gb from seagate have a bios
that supports this drive have service pak 1 an have 48
bit adressing enabled Have Win xp pro the drive is seen
as having a capacity of 152617 under properties of the
disk 0 in Administrator tool disk management but has only
a 149.04 gb space that window uses please explain why
the dif in capacity reporting and useable space by the OS
has troubled me for sometime seems all drive do this have
never seen a "xxx GB drive " report has that capacity
when in use under windows it is always less example have
another computer with and IBM drive the drive was sold as
a 60 gb drive on the spec sticker on the it reads
capacity 61.4 gb yet under windows space available is 58
gb

thanks for any answers thendric

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Greetings --

WinXP, like other operating systems, measures kilobytes,
megabytes, and gigabytes as:

1 Kb = 1024 bytes
1 Mb = 1024 Kb = 1,048,576 bytes
1 Gb = 1024 Mb = 1,073,741,824 bytes

However, a common marketing ploy used by hard drive manufacturers
to make
their products seem a bit larger than they really are is to assign the
value of an even 1,000,000,000 bytes to the gigabyte.

If you were to divide your hard drives advertised size of
160,000,000,000 bytes by 1024, you'd get a result of 156,250,000 Mb,
which is pretty close to what WinXP is reporting. The difference is a
result of the manufacturer rounding off the true size of the drive to
"160 Gb."

Bruce Chambers
--
Help us help you:



You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on
having both at once. - RAH

 

[Shenan Stanley]

My question is i have a 160 gb from seagate have a bios
that supports this drive have service pak 1 an have 48
bit adressing enabled Have Win xp pro the drive is seen
as having a capacity of 152617 under properties of the
disk 0 in Administrator tool disk management but has only
a 149.04 gb space that window uses please explain why
the dif in capacity reporting and useable space by the OS
has troubled me for sometime seems all drive do this have
never seen a "xxx GB drive " report has that capacity
when in use under windows it is always less example have
another computer with and IBM drive the drive was sold as
a 60 gb drive on the spec sticker on the it reads
capacity 61.4 gb yet under windows space available is 58
gb

If you are seeing 149GB of usable space, then you got what you paid for.

Read the box, what is the FORMATTED CAPACITY?
Essentially - here is 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

Hope that makes sense!