250GB drive says only 130GB???

[mingyu01]

You lose space because your harddrive manufactor calculate the harddisk space diffrently than windows.

harddisk company (ie. maxtor, seagate etc..) calculates as
1000bytes = 1Kb
1000Kb = 1MB
1000MB = 1gb

so 160 gb harddisk would be
160000000000 bytes
(160gb = 160000mb = 160000000kb = 160000000000bytes)
but windows calculates disk space by
1024bytes = 1Kb
1024Kb = 1 MB
1024MB = 1gb

so 160GB harddisk would be
(160gb = 163840mb = 167772160kb = 171798691840bytes)

so 160000000000byte hard drive shows up as 160000000000/1024/1024/1024 gb
and that is about 149.0116119384765625 gb
so it would show up on windows as 150gb hdd

[orkboss]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mingyu01

You lose space because your harddrive manufactor calculate the harddisk space diffrently than windows.

harddisk company (ie. maxtor, seagate etc..) calculates as
1000bytes = 1Kb
1000Kb = 1MB
1000MB = 1gb

so 160 gb harddisk would be
160000000000 bytes
(160gb = 160000mb = 160000000kb = 160000000000bytes)
but windows calculates disk space by
1024bytes = 1Kb
1024Kb = 1 MB
1024MB = 1gb

so 160GB harddisk would be
(160gb = 163840mb = 167772160kb = 171798691840bytes)

so 160000000000byte hard drive shows up as 160000000000/1024/1024/1024 gb
and that is about 149.0116119384765625 gb
so it would show up on windows as 150gb hdd

The second method is the more traditional, was it because the number of bits per byte or something like that.

[thelonegunman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by orkboss

So it appears to be a percentage of the optimum capacity, so the larger the drive the large the loss of potential space which occurs due to reformatting.

Yes, the more disk space the more formatting/windows understanding space will be lost.

You "loose" about 5/6% of a drive, so based on 5% a 4Gb drive will "loose", 200Mb, 40Gb drive will "loose" about 2Gb.

However as the drive increases, so does the percentage (slightly), so 5% rule will work for drives up to about 120gb, then use 6%...