Scandisk Ultra 2 - Missing GB

nukemdukem · 2 Jul 2016 at 11:58

Hi Guys,

Just bought a scandisk ultra 2 960GB drive as a second drive, installed the drive, was detected by BIOS.

Started windows and ran windows disk manager to allocate the drive.

Windows only sees the full capacity of the drive as 890 GB - which i have now allocated.

What happened to the other 70GB? Is it normal for SSD's to not have the full advertised storage capacity - like mobile phones?

Anyone else encountered this before?

Thanks

On Holiday · 2 Jul 2016 at 12:00

Yeah that's normal.

Like a 1TB drive shows as 930GB or thereabouts.
500GB as 465GB ish.

Not sure why SanDisk go for 240/480/960 sizes tbh.

nukemdukem · 2 Jul 2016 at 12:00

should add i chose GPT and not MBR for drive type - not sure if that makes a difference.

nukemdukem · 2 Jul 2016 at 12:01

ok cool

phew i was worried.

Really tho - they should not advertised it as 960GB - if you dont get 960GB!! lol

smilertoo · 2 Jul 2016 at 13:59

All storage mediums 'lie' about the size, they quote raw unformatted sizes which are unusable, you must format it to use it. It is particularly annoying with SSD though as its basically a fancy non volatile ram system.

BlackAle · 3 Jul 2016 at 02:18

It's simply a case that manufacturers use Gigabytes (10^9 bytes or 1,000,000,000 bytes) whereas Windows uses Gibibytes (2^30 bytes or 1,073,741,824 bytes).

It's a total myth that you lose the space when formatting.

Borealis · 3 Jul 2016 at 12:27

BlackAle said:
It's simply a case that manufacturers use Gigabytes (10^9 bytes or 1,000,000,000 bytes) whereas Windows uses Gibibytes (2^30 bytes or 1,073,741,824 bytes).

It's a total myth that you lose the space when formatting.

This. Manufacturers use "decimal" Gigabytes (powers of 10), whereas in reality all computer systems work in binary (powers of 2).

Mr-White · 3 Jul 2016 at 16:12

Have you checked the box ?

james.miller · 3 Jul 2016 at 16:15

smilertoo said:
All storage mediums 'lie' about the size, they quote raw unformatted sizes which are unusable, you must format it to use it. It is particularly annoying with SSD though as its basically a fancy non volatile ram system.

No they dont.

Boogieman_WD · 8 Jul 2016 at 11:01

Hey there, nukemdukem.

Basically @Borealis and @BlackAle said it best. You could check out this article for more info on the subject: Drive displays a smaller capacity than the indicated size on the drive label. There's a table with different capacities as well.

If you'd like to calculate them yourself you could simply divide by 1024 three times and you'll get the approximate binary capacity in GB. E.g. in your case 960 000 000 000 bytes / 1024 = 937 500 500 / 1024 = 915 527 / 1024 = 894.07GB. So basically your SSD should be ~894GB.

Cheers!
Boogieman_WD

bledd · 10 Jul 2016 at 11:26

BlackAle said:
It's simply a case that manufacturers use Gigabytes (10^9 bytes or 1,000,000,000 bytes) whereas Windows uses Gibibytes (2^30 bytes or 1,073,741,824 bytes).

It's a total myth that you lose the space when formatting.

This. you only 'lose' about 70Mb to formatting.