160gb Hard Drive?

Voy06 · 28 May 2006 at 12:45

Hi folks

I have a 160gb hard drive in the PC yet windows only has it down as a 149gb hard drive. Even Si-Soft Sandra shows it as a 149gb hard drive.

Why does this happen, is the difference taken up by Windows or something?

Thanks to anyone who can clear this up for me.

Nazbit · 28 May 2006 at 13:04

The formatted capacity and the actual capacity of the drive platters are very different.

Hdds are often detected 10gb lower than they really are when they have been formatted, on high capacity drives 20 or even 30gb is not unusual.

Voy06 · 28 May 2006 at 13:08

I use no where near 160gb anyway so I'm not gunna attempt to get it back but just out of curiosity can you get that 10gb back?

Nazbit · 28 May 2006 at 13:11

Well formatting with different file systems can mean a little less is lost, but when you actually format the drive, you are always going to loose a bit, so no.

Voy06 · 28 May 2006 at 13:17

Thanks for clearing that up for anyway. You learn something new everyday.

PhilthyPhil · 3 Jun 2006 at 20:56

Isn't this due to HDD manufactureres using gigabytes (10^9 bytes) and OSs using gibibytes (2^30 bytes) but both of them calling them gigabytes?

SiriusB · 3 Jun 2006 at 21:00

PhilthyPhil said:
Isn't this due to HDD manufactureres using gigabytes (10^9 bytes) and OSs using gibibytes (2^30 bytes) but both of them calling them gigabytes?

Precisely! HDD vendors say a GB is 1000 MB when its really 1024 MB. On smaller drives this difference isnt much of a problem, but as you get bigger the difference is much more apparent.

You really do have say the 160gb as labelled... just by a different scale to your OS

Its basically to make the HDDs seem bigger than they are!

SiriusB

PhilthyPhil · 3 Jun 2006 at 21:14

Well if either of them were more correct than the other then I would have to say it is the HDD companies. Since according to the SI system the giga prefix means 10^9 and the SI system is used by pretty much everyone.

SiriusB · 3 Jun 2006 at 22:43

PhilthyPhil said:
Well if either of them were more correct than the other then I would have to say it is the HDD companies. Since according to the SI system the giga prefix means 10^9 and the SI system is used by pretty much everyone.

You have to remember that computers work in binary, and in powers of 2. So when it comes to storage space binary 4tw!

SiriusB