Inaccurate Hard drive capacity

[m hood]

I just bought a 120gb Western Digital hard drive and
Windows XP doesn't seem to see the entire drive. Only sees
111GB in the disk management window. It is a slave drive.




Any solutions would be great.

 

[Billy]

Greetings --

Windows is accurately reporting the true size of your hard drive.

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

111 x 1,073,741,824 = 119,185,342,464 bytes, which your hard
drive's manufacturer is rounding off and calling 120 Gb. This is a
common marketing ploy (trying to assign an even 1,000,000,000 bytes to
the gigabyte) used by hard drive manufacturers to make their products
seem a bit larger than they really are.

When you can correctly explain this, which isn't a marketing ploy ("oh, conspiracy theorist"), maybe you can truly explain this another time! Look at your capacity on your drive, and I bet it has more bytes than advertised (as you so put it).

 

[Billy]

Greetings --

I have correctly explained it. Is elementary mathematics not one
of your strong suits?

LOL!

You're making yourself look worse! You based your equation on something hard drive manufacturers DO NOT do, you think they figure this in, using the binary system, they don't. They place (in your example) 120 billion *total* bytes on the drive. They are not concerned how they eventually get configured, they just sell them as units. The main problem is, you based it on this assuming hdd manufacturers makes the drive setup under a binary numeric system already;

"111 x 1,073,741,824 = 119,185,342,464 bytes, which your hard
drive's manufacturer is rounding off and calling 120 Gb. "

I have never seen a drive shown still in box, as starting off with 111gigs binary (as this example goes)! Also, they list it correctly at 120 gigabytes. Note "giga" equals a billion, no matter, so, no marketing ploys there. Remember, there is a big difference between a gigabyte in one sense, and a binary gigabyte used in data. They placed a number of units on that drive, pure and simple, and has nothing to do with how Windows (or whatever) configures it for data storage.

And I don't need to fall back on conspiracy theories to explain
why marketing people use whatever technically legal dodge they can to
put the best possible face upon whatever product they're hawking at
the moment.>

Oh Please! You come up with this bit of a beauty to shine it off as some sort of dishonesty with these manufacturers, yet you buy them! Did you per chance look at the "total" bytes on your drive (include what is set aside for boot sector(s) too)? You report back, and I bet your system shows more than what was *advertised* in your conspiracy theory.

No conspiracy -- it's simple human nature.

You obviously know nothing about even basic biology, as human nature has nothing to do with being disingenuous with a sale of a product less than what is advertised.