Real and advertised hard drive sizes - why you don't get all the space you pay for.

[EXreaction]

That has got to be one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. Not to mention the last post in here is nearly a year old.

[BipolarBill]

Well, this is a sticky.

Let me add one thing. It doesn't matter an iota what the technicalities are because you can't get a drive that has more for the same measurement. All drive makers follow the decimal convention.

It is what it is.


The Serenity Prayer

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

It's actually the "wisdom prayer", but that's another technicality.

[cyclindk]

I had a question...a 500gb Maxtor external HDD that I ordered (not yet received) from Wal-Mart; I read a review by some anonymous customer that casually mentioned that after it installs some softwar of some kind you hav 465 gigs to do with as you please. My question is, what freaking software could be taking up 35 gigs and is this normal for external HDD?!

[BipolarBill]

It doesn't use 35GB. Did you read this thread?

[ArcticFox]

Glad to see my thread is still kicking after all these days.

[cyclindk]

Why would I read every post when many seem to be discussing just "anything" of no consequence when someone could easily reply directly to my question and give me an answer?

[Steve R Jones]

Read this one:

Originally Posted by ArcticFox

I see a lot of threads asking why someone's new 80GB drive only shows up as 74.5GB, etc, and why a newly purchased 250GB drive only shows up in Windows as 137GB. Thanks to duffyone, I present the following, pulled from Western Digital's website:



Now, for those running into the 137GB limit, or any other size limit for that matter, you either...
A) Don't have Service Pack 1 installed (assuming you run XP)
or
B) Your drive controller is old enough where it doesn't support large drives. I ran into this problem with an old eMachines that had a 466Mhz Celeron. I bought an 80GB ATA/133 Maxtor and then realized my board didn't support something "that large". I could have bought a PCI IDE controller however, but decided to build a new system instead.

I'd like for this to be a sticky, any mods up for it?
Also, if I made a mistake, or you would like to add to it, speak up!

[cyclindk]

Helpful, but I was just going by what a customer mentioned and he mentioned software being responsible for the decrease in space, or at least that's what he seemed to imply... I guess I'll find out when it gets here and get back to ya'll. Thanks anyway.

[BipolarBill]

It's generally a good idea to start from the beginning - in this case, the first page, first post.

Steve was good enough to copy and paste what was already written for you.

You can see that your 500GB drive is going to show less than that in Windows. The difference between what Windows reports for capacity and what you have available is what the installed software uses.

A 500GB drive will appear as 465.66GB in Windows.

[cyclindk]

Originally Posted by BipolarBill

It's generally a good idea to start from the beginning - in this case, the first page, first post.

Steve was good enough to copy and paste what was already written for you.

You can see that your 500GB drive is going to show less than that in Windows. The difference between what Windows reports for capacity and what you have available is what the installed software uses.

A 500GB drive will appear as 465.66GB in Windows.

Alright, I just got the drive and the capacity is shown as 500 gigs and it says 35 gigs of space are already used...but, when I individually add up the sizes of the folders and files on the drive they don't add up to nearly 35 gigs (at most, 235 or so megs; absolute maximum).