XP Partitions and Formts 320GIG Drv at 305GIG

  • Thread starter Thread starter Holiday
  • Start date Start date
H

Holiday

I have a Western Digital 320GIG drive
that WindowsXP Pro will only partition and format
the drive to 305GIG during setup. Is this
a limitation?

Holiday
 
The advertised drive size that appears on the box or the label is simply
that "advertising". All drives have an actual size that differs from the
advertised or "rounded up" size that the company uses to advertise with.
After all 320 GB sounds much better than 305 GB. So the drive itself is
physically going to be less than 320 GB and could be closer to what you see.
To add to this reality when a drive is partitioned and formatted a certain
amount of space will be used up by the partitioning and formatting process.

check this link
http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/wi...e-space-on-my-hard-drive-what-was-advertised/

and read some of the posts here which likely relate very closely to your
drive size issue
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=27&threadid=2011883&STARTPAGE=1&enterthread=y
 
The advertised drive size that appears on the box or the label is simply
that "advertising". All drives have an actual size that differs from the
advertised or "rounded up" size that the company uses to advertise with.
After all 320 GB sounds much better than 305 GB. So the drive itself is
physically going to be less than 320 GB and could be closer to what you see.
To add to this reality when a drive is partitioned and formatted a certain
amount of space will be used up by the partitioning and formatting process.

check this link
http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/wi...e-space-on-my-hard-drive-what-was-advertised/

and read some of the posts here which likely relate very closely to your
drive size issue
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=27&threadid=2011883&STARTPAGE=1&enterthread=y
Click to expand...


Interesting. During setup is when Windows Setup informed me that
it was 305 GIG I assumed it formatted to 305GIG, but it did not.
298GIG is what Disk Management is reporting now, which is correct
if the math is done according to the formula:
320 * (1000^3 / 1024^3) = 298.023223876953125
Seems the bigger the drive, the more you loose.
20GIG?? I've bought hard drives less than that!
This seems a bit of false advertising on the manufactures part.

I'm not sure where Setup came up with 305GIG
 
Interesting. During setup is when Windows Setup informed me that
it was 305 GIG I assumed it formatted to 305GIG, but it did not.
298GIG is what Disk Management is reporting now, which is correct
if the math is done according to the formula:
320 * (1000^3 / 1024^3) = 298.023223876953125
Seems the bigger the drive, the more you loose.
20GIG?? I've bought hard drives less than that!
This seems a bit of false advertising on the manufactures part.

I'm not sure where Setup came up with 305GIG
Click to expand...

Same this happened during the era of CRT monitors. There was a time
were the exact "tube" size was advertised as the display size. Then,
the CRT makers lost in court and were having to advertised the
"viewable" size also.

Example: 19 inch CRT with 18 inch 'viewable" display.
 
Holiday said:
I have a Western Digital 320GIG drive
that WindowsXP Pro will only partition and format
the drive to 305GIG during setup. Is this
a limitation?
Click to expand...


All hard drive manufacturers define 1GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes, while the
rest of the computer world, including Windows, defines it as 2 to the 30th
power (1,073,741,824) bytes. So a 320 billion byte drive is actually 298GB
(I don't know why you see 305GB).

Some people point out that the official international standard defines the
"G" of GB as one billion, not 1,073,741,824. Correct though they are, using
the binary value of GB is so well established in the computer world that I
consider using the decimal value of a billion to be deceptive marketing.
 
Interesting. During setup is when Windows Setup informed me that
it was 305 GIG I assumed it formatted to 305GIG, but it did not.
298GIG is what Disk Management is reporting now, which is correct
if the math is done according to the formula:
320 * (1000^3 / 1024^3) = 298.023223876953125
Seems the bigger the drive, the more you loose.
20GIG?? I've bought hard drives less than that!
This seems a bit of false advertising on the manufactures part.

I'm not sure where Setup came up with 305GIG
Click to expand...

Setup shows disk capacity in megabytes.
(320 x 10^9) / 2^20 = 305,175 MBytes.
 
Interesting. During setup is when Windows Setup informed me that
it was 305 GIG I assumed it formatted to 305GIG, but it did not.
298GIG is what Disk Management is reporting now, which is correct
if the math is done according to the formula:
320 * (1000^3 / 1024^3) = 298.023223876953125
Seems the bigger the drive, the more you loose.
20GIG?? I've bought hard drives less than that!
This seems a bit of false advertising on the manufactures part.
Click to expand...

You lose the same percentage, so you "lose" more bytes with a larger
disk. You're correct that 320 binary GB = 298.02 decimal GB. Yeah,
it's kind of false advertising. At the very least they try to make
their product look as great as possible at the risk of misleading the
customer.
I'm not sure where Setup came up with 305GIG
Click to expand...

Neither am I.
 
Curt said:
Hence the (very slow) adoption of mebibytes, gibibytes, etc. More
info. at:
http://www.answers.com/topic/mebibyte-1
Click to expand...


It is now over eight years years since this unit was defined by the
International Electrotechnical Commission. Although I've heard of the units
before, I have never seen these units actually used anywhere.

So my prediction is that they will never catch on, and should be allowed to
die.
 
The very first time I ever heard of it was in one of Scott Muellers books on
PC Repair (you may be the one who recommended it to someone recently), and
at first I thought it was a cute little term he coined himself. Then I read
further.

You're probably right, it will *never* catch on. :-(

--
HTH,
Curt

Windows Support Center
http://aumha.org/
 
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