out of curiosity

Soldato
Joined
5 Feb 2009
Posts
16,520
Location
N. Ireland
installed a 2nd hdd(500gb f3) to use as extra storage. when i look at the drive in 'my computer' it shows xxxGB free of 465Gb.

my os drive, which is the exact same drive reports back the same, but i assumed that the os had reserved this 35gb for some reason or other. what do the drives actually keep this 35gb back for?
 
Its to do with the way the harddrive works. It needs a small amount of storage before and after each 'segment' which is then addressed to. So that 35GB is used by the system to know what is where on the rest of the drive.
 
On top of that, hard drive makers rate the capacity of their drives in Giga Bytes (Billions of bytes) while windows rates storage size in Gibibytes (2^30 bytes), this discrepency (1GiB ≈ 1.074GB) means that you can feel a bit short changed when you plug the drive in, but it is all above board.
 
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