Wrong capacity displayed with new 300GB second HD

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Guest

I just added a new 300GB hard drive to my Dell 8300 with Win XP professional.
When I check the capacity of the hard drive, it displays 279GB in the hard
drive list. Under Properties for the drive, it shows a very small amount of
used space, 279 GB free, but on the pie chart, it shows 300GB free.

Do I need to break this drive up into multiple partitions? Is there a chance
that the full capacity of the drive is accessible, but the display in
properties is flawed? Finally, I checked computer managment under the admin
tools, and it shows the drive to be 279.47 GB, and 99% free. The drive was
formatted as an NTFS drive.

Thanks for your help!!!
 
Because the drive manufacturer uses base 10 to figure size and Windows uses
base 2

Base 10: 1000 x 1000 x 1000 = 1,000,000,000 (1 GB)

Base 2: 1024 x 1024 x1024 = 1,073,741,824 (1 GB)

279 x 1,073,741,824 = 299,573,968,896 or pretty close to 300Gb
 
More a simple answer, Ticker...

If you ever read a textbook like from school, you know how it's got
several pages of the 'Table of Contents"? Well a Hard Drive has to have
the same thing, a ToC or FAT (File Allocation Table) The larger the
drive you have, the more size the Table of Content Needs. My 200GB
requires about 13GB for this. I would presume that a 300GB would
require about 20-22GB

But yes, Jerry's statement is also totally correct although I've never
heard it explained that way.
 
All hard drives require partitioning, a corresponding filesystem, and
formatting. The master boot record, partition, and filesystem all use
space. This used space becomes more apparent as a HD's capacity is
increased.

If you didn't write, add or copy any files to this drive, I would suspect
system restore added its folder to your new hard drive. Thus 99% vice 100%.
free.
 
Thank you all for your replies. I did not think there was anything wrong
with the Hard Drive, but it is really good to know why this happens. I
appreciate your responses.
 
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