Hi Viv
Here is the same response that I posted in this thread earlier. It also
applies to your query.
You are not missing any space - although the drive manufacturer could be
clearer. For drive manufacturers 1,000,000,000 bytes = 1 Gb, whereas an OS
will regard 1,073,741,824 bytes as 1 Gb. (It's a decimal V binary thing)
The best way to see this is in XP. With XP installed, open My Computer,
select the appropriate
drive and right-click, select properties... beside 'capacity' you will see
the total number of bytes on your disk and to the right the number of
Gigabytes.
For example, on my 120 Gb drive I have 120,023,252,992 bytes... which is
also listed in disk properties as a capacity of 111 Gb.
The Hard Drive manufacturer refers to the 'bytes' total in my case as 120
Gb... and, in purely decimal terms, it is - 120,000,000,000 bytes.
The 111 Gb is what the operating system (XP in this case) 'sees'... because
the OS
calculates the storage in binary terms... 1024 bytes as 1 Kb, 1024 Kb as 1
Mb, and 1024 MB as 1 Gb.....
so in my case 120,023,252,992 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 (that's bytes =>
Kilobytes => Megabytes => Gigabytes) is 111.78 Gigabytes as far as the
computer is concerned. (The drive capacity may only show the first 3
digits.)
Neither calculation of the disk size is 'wrong' ...... they are equivalent.
In your case, the drive capacity of 120,000,00,000
bytes (or close to that value) will be referred to by 'My Computer' as 111
Gb
after the above calculation.
Of course, by using the decimal definition drive manufacturers are only
obliged to provide 120,000,000,000 bytes when they claim a drive size of 120
Gb.
Hope that helps
Pete
