Can anyone explain why Windows reports the wrong size for my hard drive's. I have 2 120gig hard drive's fitted and when i look at the hard drive properties this is what i see. 120,023,252,992 Bytes 111GB And the second hard drive this is what i see 122,904,969,216 Bytes 114GB Can anyone tell me where the missing space is as there are no other partitions on any of the hard drive's i have used various partition viewer's and they all say there is only the one partition on each hard drive. Thank's in advance.

i have no explanation for this but i have 1 60 gig and 1 120 gig and windows says the 60 is 54.7 and the 120 is 114 . and my friend has two 120's and the both show at 114 in xp so i just live with it.

1 MegaByte= 1024 Bytes now do the math

It has to do with how windows read a byte, the drive byte size is 1024, windows reads it as 1000 though I think, every drive shows this loss.

Hi Waz & cold613, As vince & Atomicboy added: Manufacturers like to think 1Gb= 1 000 000 000 bytes ComputerPeople know 1kb= 1 024 bytes There was a 'recent' post that showed all the maths involved, search for it if you want to know exactly.('Missing drive-space') The partitioning-info takes up some space too, so all-in-all I guess the numbers you're showing appear normal. svg

The reason is mathematical, as svg said. First, Windows detects drive space as a power of 2 function. So, to Windows, 1KB = 2^10 (2 to the power of 10) = 1,024 bytes. Then: 1MB = 2^20 = 1,048,576 bytes 1GB = 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes 1TB = 2^40 = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes etc..... However, this makes drive look a little small in Windows. Hard drive manufacturers don't like that. They want the biggest number on the box as possible. So, they use the conventional base-10 method of counting. To them, 1KB = 1,000 bytes. Then: 1MB = 1,000,000 bytes 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes 1TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes Now let's do some math. Your hard drive says it has 120GB. It's detected as having exactly 120,023,252,992 bytes. Now, that's base-10. Let's convert it. 120,023,252,992 / (divided by) 1,073,741,824 (Window's # for 1GB). We get a nice round 111.78GB. The second drive is 122,904,969,216 / 1,073,741,824, and we get 114.464GB Enjoy.