Just installed second hard drive

[Newtechie]

Hi -

I just installed, partitioned and formatted a second 160gb drive as a slave
and I have not installed any programs on it yet but it's saying there's only
149gb available. Why is that when there's nothing installed on it?

Newtechie

 

[Guest]

Normally there is always about 8-10% of drive which is not used, mine is a 120G about 111G is usable, I think it's to do with how the disk management allocates the clusters and their size on a disk for best usage (the more clusters the better, but there will always be some 'overhang' left)!

 

[Ron Sommer]

1024*1024*1024=1073741824 bytes
Hard drive manufactures use 1000*1000*1000=1000000000 bytes.
160,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,872 = 149

 

[Bill Rubin]

Excellent response. You have to wonder why the consumer law
regulators never stepped in and made the drive manufacturers
come clean on capacity. They cracked down on the display
manufacturers a few years ago and made them say what a 17"
monitor really was in terms of viewable size.

Bill

 

[Plato]

I just installed, partitioned and formatted a second 160gb drive as a slave
and I have not installed any programs on it yet but it's saying there's only
149gb available. Why is that when there's nothing installed on it?

Because that's the real size of the drive you bought.

 

[Tumbleweed]

IIRC there a law case underway against various disk drive vendors for
exactly this.

BTW, if you have system restore set up for a disk, IIRC XP reserves 12% of
the disk for system restore.
I'm not sure how that manifests itself , whether that is hidden or just the
amount of space it might use.