at50 said:
Hi,
I am setting up an old PC as a file store instead of throwing it away
and have bought a samsung 160 gig drive. This board has the promise
ata100 controller (pdc20265r) which I have since discovered being
ata100 only supports upto 128 gig drives. DOH!
Unfortunately I didn't check this first but I have upgraded the BIOS
to AVU1009 and the promise controller to 2.00.0.29 and now I can see
149 gig of the drive, sooo close.
Is there any way I can get access to that last bit of space please?
Many thanks for reading and any help GREATLY appreciated.
Cheers,
Tom
I know it sounds stupid, but 149GB is the correct size reported by a PC for
a 160GB Hard Drive.
This is due to the difference between the Decimal Gigabyte used by Harddrive
manufacturers, and the Binary Gigabyte used on a PC.
The following text was copied from Samsung's FAQ pages for this issue.
----------------------------
Capacity of an 80-GB Hard Drive Reported as 74 GB
This is because of the dual meaning of the word "gigabyte," depending on
whether it's calculated in binary (base-2) or decimal (base-10) mathematics.
A gigabyte means 109 (1,000,000,000) bytes. A gigabyte also means 230
(1,073,741,824) bytes.
An 80-gigabyte hard drive has a capacity of 80 billion bytes. Since we
think in terms of base-10, when we say "gigabyte" we mean the decimal
gigabyte. A computer's architecture is designed on powers of two, so when a
computer says "gigabyte," it means the binary gigabyte.
Therefore, an operating system may display the capacity of an 80-gigabyte
hard drive as 74.5 gigabytes. There will appear to be 7.4 percent fewer
gigabytes, but each is also 7.4 percent larger.
In much the same way that a tree is the same size whether its height is said
to be 25 feet or 8.2 meters, 80 decimal gigabytes and 74.5 binary gigabytes
both refer to exactly the same capacity, 80,000,000,000 bytes.
The same dual meaning also exists with other units:
Binary Value Unit Decimal Value
1,024 210 kilobyte (kB) 103 1,000
1,048,576 220 megabyte (MB) 106 1,000,000
1,073,741,824 230 gigabyte (GB) 109 1,000,000,000
1,099,511,627,776 240 terabyte (TB) 1012 1,000,000,000,000
To eliminate confusion, in 1998 the International Electrotechnical
Commission devised the terms kibibyte (kiB), mebibyte (MiB), gibibyte (GiB)
and tebibyte (TiB) to refer to the binary units, though these have yet to
attain widespread usage and are not considered part of standard SI
(International System of Units).