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

[osprey4]

Originally Posted by cyclindk

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).

You should open up the drive and make sure there aren't any missing pieces to the platters.