New
#111
I already knew this but I'm going to link it to some friends that don't know
HDD's - the Advertized size vs the Actual size.
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New #112
Well, I didn't lose a lot when I got a 250 GB laptop HDD, did I? :P
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New #113
I am sorry to bump this, but SquonkSC you should pay more attention if you write such guides. You keep mixing GB with Gb and TB with Tb! This is not very right, because you confuse bytes with bits this way. And you cannot say that it does not matter, because it always means bytes! See some articles about new hard drives or memory card technology and you will notice they always declare data density in Gb (Gigabits) per inch. Just a friendly but important notice IMO...
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New #114
So according to the first post, a harddisk with an advertized size of 640 GB would have an actual size of 596 GB, right?
I'm asking because my Acer laptop had 556 GB from the beginning, despite having an advertized size of 640 GB.
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New #115
Jay10, there's probably a hidden partition with stuff needed for the Acer Restore business that uses the rest. Look in Disk Management and see if you can spot it there. :)
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New #116
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New #117
Confusin' ain't it?
A little primer for you novices who may not know, I'm not meaning to belittle anyone. Just explainin'. This took me some time to understand too.
Computers understand the binary number system, only two numbers, 0 or 1. All data on your computer is in bits, a 0 (zero) or 1 (one), or on or off. A bit is represented by the lower-case "b".
Eight bits= 1 Byte, or character and is represented by the upper-case "B". As you double this over and over, 2,4,8,16,32,64,128........you'll get to 1024, which is 1KB to the computer. This means K, kilo, 1024 Bytes. Continue the doubling and you get to 1,048,576 which is a binary Mega Byte, MB.
1024KB=1 MB, 1 million binary bytes or Megabyte, 1024MB=1GB, or Gigabyte, one billionbinary bytes, 1024 Gigabytes=1TB, 1 Trillion binary bytes or terabyte.
HDD makers use the metric system to describe drive sizes:
KB= 1,000 bytes
MB=1,000,000 (million) bytes
GB=1,000,000,000 (billion)bytes
TB=1,000,000,000,000 (trillion) bytes
When you buy, say, a 500GB drive it in fact has 500 billion bytes, but counted in the metric system. In the binary system, which you computer reports, it is shown as about 465.661 GB. No one is "cheated" per se, but speaking different languages, binary and metric. It is misleading however if you don't understand why your shiny new 500GB drive says it's only 465GB.
It seems RAM, your memory, is sold with binary designations. That is, 1GB of RAM is in fact 1,073,741,824 bytes and not 1,000,000,000 bytes.
Hope this helps out.
Last edited by Britton30; 09 Jun 2011 at 22:42. Reason: corrected "oops"
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New #118
My new Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB (model number ST32000542AS) is being formatted right now, the final formatted capacity will be 1863.01GB (per Disk Management).
On the bright side, Windows 7 x64 Ultimate saw the drive perfectly and installed the necessary drivers (no fuss, no muss)
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New #119
hello guys,
info query..
i am owning an i5 500G laptop...
my problem: usable space is only 407G ...
by looking on the disk management, 50G is FAT32... the 407G i said above is NTFS...
what happen to the 43G?? (i do know i cannot fully utilize the 500G as what stated above)...
can i reduce the 50G FAT32?
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New #120
The formatted capacity of a 500 GB drive is about 465 GB.
What is on the 50 GB FAT 32 partition? Why do you have it? Is this a second hand computer? Most partitions on most PCs are NTFS.
Post a picture of what you are seeing in Disk Management.
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