Quake3World

Why is the actual capacity less than the advertized capacity? My 250gig maxtor shows up as a 233gig, but why? The bigger the hdd gets the more it "loses".

the difference i'm told is some hard drive are advertized as
as gigabytes some as gigabits

and or windows may have taken some space as a hidden partition for Boot stuff etc..

HArddrive manufactures see 1gig as 1000000bits wile the rest of the world see it as 1000000bytes

What? That would make a drive 8 times smaller than you're expecting it to be.

HD Manufacturers sometimes see 1Mb as 1000Kb instead of 1024 and therefore lose some space.

You incur some slack space depending on the file system your using. I lose 8Mb off my 40Gb drive when formatting into NTFS.

However, 233? not sure. Many manufacturers do round their figures upwards though. HDs rarely come at exactly the size marketed...

you sure you're looking at the right number?
when you goto properties of the drive look at the actual byte count next to capacity... if i add up all the partitions of my 80G WD drive i get: 80,023,709,696

Dr_Watson wrote:you sure you're looking at the right number?
when you goto properties of the drive look at the actual byte count next to capacity... if i add up all the partitions of my 80G WD drive i get: 80,023,709,696

Yep, I get 25099xxxxxxx bytes. So I guess Maxtor sees 1 gigabyte as 1000³ bytes and not 1024³ bytes.

really i think the problem is that manufacturers round the numbers up. My 200gb harddrive is really a 186gb harddrive. And i haven't bothered to do the math, but I don't think that would be the number if they were counting 1000 as 1mb instead of 1024. It just doesn't seem like they would be right numbers... but anyway, like I said, they most likely just round up the numbers to make it sell for slightly more than it's worth.

it comes from the translation of 1GB being 2^30 or 1,073,741,824 bytes
where we humans think of 1GB being 1,000,000,000 bytes
so if you can sell a hard drive with a sticker on it that says "250GB capacity" and not really be lying... why not?
so basically, some of your bytes are being lost in translation from computer to human.

Kammesennin wrote:really i think the problem is that manufacturers round the numbers up. My 200gb harddrive is really a 186gb harddrive. And i haven't bothered to do the math, but I don't think that would be the number if they were counting 1000 as 1mb instead of 1024. It just doesn't seem like they would be right numbers... but anyway, like I said, they most likely just round up the numbers to make it sell for slightly more than it's worth.

1GB = 1073741824
1073741824 * 186 = 199715979264
aka.. "200 gb"

its not rounding.. just math in base 2 vs base 10

gigabyte
gibibyte
marketing capacity