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Smaller than 'Advertised' drives?

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Name: radon
Date: April 11, 2002 at 16:41:00 Pacific
Comment:

Why would my brand new Maxtor 80GB drive only show 75GB capacity? A real reason or is the drive really just 75GB?



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Response Number 1
Name: EC
Date: April 11, 2002 at 17:09:48 Pacific
Reply:

If it came on an OEM PC, then the OS takes a few Gigs.


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Response Number 2
Name: 666
Date: April 11, 2002 at 17:14:11 Pacific
Reply:

80 gigs is the unformatted size. It really turns out to have a usefull space of about 75-76 gigs


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Response Number 3
Name: bill 2
Date: April 11, 2002 at 17:14:46 Pacific
Reply:

You might be interested at looking at this post.
http://computing.net/windows95/wwwboard/forum/109739.html


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Response Number 4
Name: Elias
Date: April 11, 2002 at 17:15:53 Pacific
Reply:

Hard drives usually dont show their entire
capacity...I think some space is used in the
workings of it.

Im not sure however if the amount lost is
usually as much as 5 g


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Response Number 5
Name: radon
Date: April 11, 2002 at 17:29:04 Pacific
Reply:

The HDD was clean when I bought it (no OEM) and when I used Maxtor's Disk Setup utility (similar to FDISK but with GUI) it said the total capacity was 75GB, brand new. 5GB seems awful big for boot sector and such...


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Response Number 6
Name: radon
Date: April 11, 2002 at 17:32:20 Pacific
Reply:

Thanks for the reference of the other post!

It seems stupid for manufacturers to see 1MB as 1,000 bytes when it is really 1,024.

Thanks all!


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Response Number 7
Name: Terri
Date: April 11, 2002 at 17:36:45 Pacific
Reply:

My 40G hard drive after partitioning shows up as only 38.4G.


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Response Number 8
Name: Dave C
Date: April 11, 2002 at 19:07:10 Pacific
Reply:

Taken from DAN in the post BILL_2 mentioned:

"Manufacturer 1MB = 1,000,000 bytes
Windows 1MB = 1,048,576 bytes"

If we divide 1,000,000 by 1,048,576 (to get the amount of disk spce lost in the conversion) you get about 0.9536

Multiply that by 80 (your advertised GB) and you get 76.28, which is close enough to what your system sees for me to believe Dan is correct.

(And multiply that number by 40, and you get 38.25, which is awfully close to what Terri's computer reports)

Minus boot sector, ect, I would think that would account for the 'missing' space.

HTH
-Dave C


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Response Number 9
Name:
Date: April 12, 2002 at 00:29:24 Pacific
Reply:

It's all in the maths and the way you choose to determine the size.


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Response Number 10
Name: radon
Date: April 12, 2002 at 14:40:36 Pacific
Reply:

Great input.

Thanks all!


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