Hard Drive Space Lost

[Riley]

Just bought a Hitachi Deskstar 7k250 - the 160gb eide version. Formatted it NTFS and the size reported by windows is just 127gb Is this normal? I was aware that the amount of space goes down a little but over 30GB???

[directhex]

your BIOS has a 127Gb cap on its hard disk size. try reading http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/down...tm#FeatureTool and look on your mobo manu's homepage for a bios update that supports 48bit LBA properly

[Austin]

You should also expect to lose space for two prime reasons. Firstly you lose space when formatting as well as actually storing files (averagely you lose half the cluster size per file). Secondly it's std (though despicable) practice in the storage industry to use an approximate measure for MB, GB etc. Really there are 1024 bytes in 1KB, 1024KB in 1MB and 1024MB in 1GB. However these are approximated to 1000 instead of 1024.

So the storage industry say 1MB is 1,000,000 bytes when in fact it is 1,048,576 bytes. Hence they say 1GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes when it should be 1,073,741,824. So when you buy a 160GB HD you don't get 160 true GB you actually get 149 real GB (over 7% less than stated). Anyone want to help me file a lawsuit? We see relatively similar trends in both ROM sizes and networking where Kb, Mb etc are used instead of KB, MB etc. The diff? 'Kb' is commonly used to denote Kilobits instead of Kilobytes (KB) and since 8bits=8bytes it means when talking ROMs and networking you're probably 8 times slower or smaller than you might imagine. Hence the average Broadband Internet Connection isn't truly 512KB/s but 512Kb/s which is actually 64KB/s so no where near the half megabyte you might have thought you were getting. This is more widely known than the storage industry's approximate measuring though.

(Sorry I ramble at night / early morning ... okay ramble more then). As said you do lose space formatting too and also many mobos (ATA100 or slower) fail to recognise a HD larger than 127GB(ish) but it should be addressable by either losing the end of the drive or via an update (BIOS or sw patch). BTW as said my mind isn't very clear at 2am so let me know if I got things ... less than right!

[atifds9]

Very interesting austin i always wondered why i could only download at 60k max when using my "half meg connection"!!

Now i know.