Western Digital Hard Drive

[Johnny]

I just bought a 500 GB Western Digital hard drive. I just wonder why
all of it is not being used?

Disk Management shows Disk 0 465.76 GB. That's 456.47 for C, and 9.29
GB for Unallocated space. The unallocated space is there because I
deleted the old Vista factory image. I have the disks, so I don't need it.

What happened to the other 34 GB?

I have Windows 7 Home Premium, but installed Vista first, and the hard
drive was formatted using the Vista installation disks I made when I
bought the Compaq computer.

 

[David W. Hodgins]

I just bought a 500 GB Western Digital hard drive. I just wonder why
all of it is not being used?

Disk Management shows Disk 0 465.76 GB. That's 456.47 for C, and 9.29
GB for Unallocated space. The unallocated space is there because I
deleted the old Vista factory image. I have the disks, so I don't need it.

What happened to the other 34 GB?

That's because the marketers of hard drives chose to use a definition
of a MB being 1000*1000, instead of 1024*1024. Add another * for GB.

hdparm -I /dev/sd?|grep MB
will show both the lines
device size with M = 1024*1024: 953869 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 1000204 MBytes (1000 GB)
(This marketed as a one terabyte drive).

The partitioning software uses the same definition of a MB that is
used for ram, i.e. 1024*1024, not the marketers definition.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix for more info

Regards, Dave Hodgins

 

[Johnny]

That's because the marketers of hard drives chose to use a definition
of a MB being 1000*1000, instead of 1024*1024. Add another * for GB.

hdparm -I /dev/sd?|grep MB
will show both the lines
device size with M = 1024*1024: 953869 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 1000204 MBytes (1000 GB)
(This marketed as a one terabyte drive).

The partitioning software uses the same definition of a MB that is
used for ram, i.e. 1024*1024, not the marketers definition.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix for more info

Regards, Dave Hodgins

Thanks for the information. Western Digital should have added enough
space, no matter how they figure it, to show up in Disk Management as a
500 GB hard drive, or Disk Management should use the same system the
hard drive manufacturers use, and just show it as a 500 GB hard drive.

 

[VanguardLH]

I just bought a 500 GB Western Digital hard drive. I just wonder why
all of it is not being used?

Disk Management shows Disk 0 465.76 GB. That's 456.47 for C, and 9.29
GB for Unallocated space. The unallocated space is there because I
deleted the old Vista factory image. I have the disks, so I don't need it.

What happened to the other 34 GB?

I have Windows 7 Home Premium, but installed Vista first, and the hard
drive was formatted using the Vista installation disks I made when I
bought the Compaq computer.

One view is to use decimal for size. Marketing loves to do that to make
disks look bigger. Another view is binary: size is a power of 2. There
is the difference between gigabytes and gibibytes.

If you use the binary notation that the *computer* uses (power of 2)
then 1 gigabyte = 2^30 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes. So 465.76 x 2^30
bytes = 500,105,991,946 bytes. So there's your 500 GB (in marketspeak).

 

[VanguardLH]

Thanks for the information. Western Digital should have added enough
space, no matter how they figure it, to show up in Disk Management as a
500 GB hard drive, or Disk Management should use the same system the
hard drive manufacturers use, and just show it as a 500 GB hard drive.

So when you say you have 10 fingers, are you counting in decimal (power
or 10) or binary (power of 2)? There's what people understand and
there's what computers require.

If someone chose to show you a hexidecimal representation of your disk
size, boy, you'd really be disappointed that it wasn't the same big
decimal number (10 hex digits for 746A528800 instead of 12 decimal
digits for 500000000000).

You got the 500,000,000,000 bytes you purchased so stop complaining.

 

[Paul]

Thanks for the information. Western Digital should have added enough
space, no matter how they figure it, to show up in Disk Management as a
500 GB hard drive, or Disk Management should use the same system the
hard drive manufacturers use, and just show it as a 500 GB hard drive.

If you do "dd --list" in command prompt, you'll see it is
just slightly bigger than 500GB (not GiB). I use this utility,
to get sizes for things, accurate to the nearest byte.

http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd-0.5.zip

This is part of the output of dd --list. You
redirect it like this, to be able to copy and
paste the output later. The output is apparently
going to stderr instead of stdout, which is
why the necessary redirect is a bit weird. The "2>"
redirects stderr messages into the text file.

dd --list 2> mydisks.txt

And this is an entry for my 500GB disk. Copied
out of the mydisks.txt file.

\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0
link to \\?\Device\Harddisk1\DR1
Fixed hard disk media. Block size = 512
size is 500107862016 bytes

The "Partition0" entry is an entry describing the
entire disk. Whereas "Partition1" describes the
size of just the first partition (which will be
smaller).

And 500,107,862,016 is just slightly bigger than 500GB,
so no class action lawsuit over false capacity claims
is necessary. They have lawyers design the hard
drives, rather than engineers, so they can't be
sued for false advertising

Your drive will not necessarily have the same value.
The value has to be factorable by certain numbers,
so there's some justification for the size. But
I'm too lazy to figure out what that might be. It
might be divisible by both 9 and by 7. And also by
512, which is a legacy sector size.

Divisibility by 63*512, is for rounding to the
nearest track of "fake" large disk geometry. Why
that's important, I haven't a clue. I wouldn't
expect any software to have a heart failure if that
wasn't true. And "63*512" has nothing to do with the
actual design of the platter data layout. The layout
takes full advantage of the LBA nature of modern
disks, and each track can have a variable amount
of data (zoned layout). It means, in all probability,
there is a bit more, perfectly good capacity on
the disk, but it just abruptly ends at 500,107,862,016.

Paul

 

[Johnny]

So when you say you have 10 fingers, are you counting in decimal (power
or 10) or binary (power of 2)? There's what people understand and
there's what computers require.

If someone chose to show you a hexidecimal representation of your disk
size, boy, you'd really be disappointed that it wasn't the same big
decimal number (10 hex digits for 746A528800 instead of 12 decimal
digits for 500000000000).

You got the 500,000,000,000 bytes you purchased so stop complaining.

I did not get the disk size I purchased, boy, it was adversitized as a
500 GB hard drive, and Windows 7 said is was a 465.76 GB hard drive.

Now you can take your math and shove it up your ass.

 

[John McGaw]

So when you say you have 10 fingers, are you counting in decimal (power
or 10) or binary (power of 2)? There's what people understand and
there's what computers require.

If someone chose to show you a hexidecimal representation of your disk
size, boy, you'd really be disappointed that it wasn't the same big
decimal number (10 hex digits for 746A528800 instead of 12 decimal
digits for 500000000000).

You got the 500,000,000,000 bytes you purchased so stop complaining.

There are 10 sorts of people in the world: those who understand binary and
those who don't.

 

[VanguardLH]

I did not get the disk size I purchased, boy, it was adversitized as a
500 GB hard drive, and Windows 7 said is was a 465.76 GB hard drive.

Now you can take your math and shove it up your ass.

And I say its a 746A528800 byte hard disk. Oooh. A rose by any other
name is still a rose.

So you just came here to rant, not for help or information.

 

[VanguardLH]

There are 10 sorts of people in the world: those who understand binary and
those who don't.

Toddlers learn to count using the base 10 (decimal). Guess Johnny's
high school didn't teach different base numbering systems.

If he wants someone to placate him to show a different number in the
Disk Manager then have him placate himself and code his own utilities.
Or he could just right-click on a partition shown in Microsoft's tools
(Disk Manager or Windows Explorer), select properties, to see both the
decimal and binary based measures along with the Capacity value.

Wait until Johnny uses a temperature monitoring utility that measures in
Celsius by default instead of Fahrenheit. After his computer fries,
he'll complain about the use a scale he doesn't prefer.

 

[Johnny]

And I say its a 746A528800 byte hard disk. Oooh. A rose by any other
name is still a rose.

So you just came here to rant, not for help or information.

I came here for information, and it was provided in the first reply, and
the link to the Wikipedia article.

Your sarcastic post provided no information, it's only purpose was to
antagonize, and you can see it worked.

I try my best to be polite to people, but I always run into someone like
you.

 

[VanguardLH]

I would suggest that you contact WD and tell them they ripped you off...lol

They'll just tell him the same information we already gave him here;
however, since they are PAID support staff, they'll bite their tongue
when he decides to continue whining thereafter and bid him a good day by
simply repeating "Is there anything else I can help you with today?"
without overtly reacting to his bitching. They'll roll their eyes to
show the tech support guy in the next cubicle to hint at "Yeah, I got
one of those, again." Of course, Johnny could ask for a refund here,
too, on what he paid ... lol.

Bet he doesn't whine when he gets 13 donuts in a "baker's dozen"
although it didn't match his prefering counting method. "What, you gave
me 13 donuts and I only ordered a dozen. Why didn't you give me exactly
the number that I asked for? Well, uh, I don't care what that term
means, I don't use it, so here's your lousy extra donut!"