Lost Hard Drive Space

  • Thread starter Thread starter Terry
  • Start date Start date
T

Terry

I just installed a new Maxtor 160gb hard drive. I am
running winxp Pro. Maxtor program told me that I had
163gb. I went to my computer and it told me I had 152gb.
Can someone help.

Thanks
Terry.
 
Hard drive manufacturers market drives in terms of decimal (base 10) capacity. In decimal notation, one megabyte (MB) is equal to 1,000,000 bytes, and one Gigabyte (GB) is equal to 1,000,000,000 bytes.

Programs such as FDISK, system BIOS, and Windows use the binary (base 2) numbering system. In the binary numbering system, one megabyte is equal to 1,048,576 bytes, and one gigabyte is equal to 1,073,741,824 bytes.

Simply put, decimal and binary translates to the same amount of storage capacity. Lets say you wanted to measure the distance from point A to point B. The distance from A to B is one kilometer or .621 miles. It is the same distance, but it is reported differently due to the measurement.

Capacity Calculation Formula


Decimal capacity / 1,048,576 = Binary MB capacity

Example: A 40 GB hard drive is approximately 40,000,000,000 bytes (40 x 1,000,000,000).
40,000,000,000 / 1,048,576 = 38,162 megabytes

In the table below are examples of approximate numbers that the drive may report.



Decimal Binary MB Windows Output
20 GB 19,073 MB 18.6 GB
40 GB 38,610 MB 37.3 GB
60 GB 57,220 MB 55.8 GB
80 GB 76,293 MB 74.5 GB
120 GB 114,440 MB 111.7 GB
160 GB 152,587 MB 149 GB


--
Nicholas

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------


| I just installed a new Maxtor 160gb hard drive. I am
| running winxp Pro. Maxtor program told me that I had
| 163gb. I went to my computer and it told me I had 152gb.
| Can someone help.
|
| Thanks
| Terry.
 
Terry

You have not lost any hard drive space, although the drive manufacturer
could be
clearer.

In XP, 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 40 Gb 'data' disk I have 40,007,729,152 bytes... which is
also listed in disk properties as a capacity of 37.2 Gb.

The Hard Drive manufacturer refers to the 'bytes' total in my case as
40 Gb... and, in purely decimal terms, it is - 40,000,000,000 bytes.

The 37.2 Gb is what the operating system (XP) 'sees'... because the OS
uses binary notation to calculate 1024 bytes as 1 Kb, 1024 Kb as 1 Mb, and
1024 MB as 1 Gb.....

so in my case 40007729152 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 (that's bytes => Kilobytes =>
Megabytes => Gigabytes) is 37.2 Gigabytes as far as the computer is
concerned.

Neither calculation of the disk size is 'wrong' ...... they are equivalent.

In your case the drive capacity - approx 160,030,916,608 bytes - should be
referred to by the computer as 149.04 Gb. (The drive capacity may only show
the first 3 digits.)

(Frankly if your 'My Computer' shows a 152 Gb capacity for the cost of 149
Gb consider yourself lucky to have the extra 3 Gb.)

Hope that helps
Pete
 
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