western digital internal 160 gb showing 150 gb

[Manish Tomar]

Hi all,

I have recently bought a western digital internal sata 160 gb hdd and
it is showing 150 gb (10 gb short!!!) as its capacity in disk
managment in windows xp. the same size is shown in BIOS also which is
from AMI. i m wondering whether my piece is faulty or all these kind of
hdds show the same.

i know that for some tech reasons hdds show less than the spec but 10
gb is lot of space. If anyone has experienced the same prob pls tell
me.

Thanks in advance,
Manish

 

[Clint]

Sounds about right. There's two ways to measure a Gigabyte. One way is
1000*1000*1000 = 1,000,000,000 bytes. The other way is 1024*1024*1024 =
1,073,741,824 bytes. Your HD manufacturer rated the drive size using the
first method, and Windows (and apparently your BIOS) are showing the size
using the second one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

Clint

 

[DaveW]

The harddrive is fine. 160 GB is the UNFORMATTED capacity. Formatting that
size of harddrive uses up 10 GB of space (really), leaving you with a
FORMATTED capacity of 150 GB.

 

[Anna]

The harddrive is fine. 160 GB is the UNFORMATTED capacity. Formatting
that size of harddrive uses up 10 GB of space (really), leaving you with a
FORMATTED capacity of 150 GB.

Manish:
DaveW's explanation is incorrect. The difference in the HDD manufacturer's
advertised disk capacity and what the system recognizes has nothing to do
with the formatting of the HDD. Formatting does not "use up 10 GB of
space" - really!

Your 160 GB HDD as advertised by the HDD manufacturer is seen in binary
terms of about 149 GB by the operating system and reported as such. There's
a move on to encourage HDD manufacturers to advertise their wares in binary
terms and some of them are supposedly moving in that direction from what we
have heard.
Anna