Hard drive capacity on laptop.

mickmac76

Hi
I just got a new laptop delivered today from laptops direct. The laptop was advertised as having a hard drive of 750GB. When I powered it up I found the total capacity of the drive is 679GB. I know the drive is always smaller than the advertised size but is 70GB lower excessive or would it be considered pretty normal.

Mick.

Gamayun

In computing terms 1kb = 1024b, 1mb = 1024kb etc. However manufacturers divide by 1000 instead and as a result the capacity seems larger than it actually is.

However 750GB should be showing up as 698.5GB so you are being short changed somewhere.

Is there a recover partition making up the missing 20GB perhaps?

coylemj

Gamayun wrote: »

Is there a recover partition making up the missing 20GB perhaps?

+1 There may be a partition with recovery data which you can burn on to CD/DVD at which point you may be allowed to delete that partition and recover the space.

Manufacturers used to ship a 'recovery CD' with each laptop, this would be used in a situation where you had a disk crash and installed a new HDD or a corrupt disk that had to be reformatted and then needed to restore the machine to it's condition when it left the factory.

Nowadays, to save money they shove this data onto a separate partition on the hard drive and it's up to you up to create recovery disks.

yoyo

That does sound excessively low, what is the hard disk model number as displayed in device manager under disk drives?

Nick

excollier

Maybe around 5GB is taken up by the OS, Windows is usually a bit bloated with unnecessary trial stuff.

riclad

My laptop win7 has About 20gig hidden partition with windows 7 recovery on it,
hd drive c is 220gig.
I Used it to reinstall the os once.
its better than using a dvd which may get lost ,or scratched.
If you go to control panel, administration, storage ,it,ll show up there .
There maybe also a partition 100 meg ,
leave it as is .its part of the recovery data system.
if you get a crash, or a bad virus , it allows you to start over reinstall windows .Takes about 20 minutes.
you can buy a 1000 gig drive usb drive 1terabyte, around 75euro.
I would not worry bout losing 20gig.
I think win8 is more like 15-20gig in size.
MOST laptops now have ms office student version installed or a demo version of office .

BloodBath

Aye windows usually takes around 20 - 25gb as it reserves around 8gb for virtual memory and 10gb or so for hibernation + more for restore points ect.

The values of these can be changed.

mickmac76

Thanks for all the replies. The hard disc has a capacity of 679GB of which 645GB is currently free. About 20GB of the used space is taken up by windows 8 and there are more files that came preinstalled a lot of which I will be deleting once I get used to the laptop. There is no partition showing up for a hard disk recovery but I'd imagine there is one on a new computer since there is no recovery disc.

Mick.

coylemj

Gamayun wrote: »

In computing terms 1kb = 1024b, 1mb = 1024kb etc. However manufacturers divide by 1000 instead and as a result the capacity seems larger than it actually is.

You're suggesting that there is a level of trickery which is not true. 1KB and 1MB have different meanings when dealing with binary-addressible memory (RAM) and magnetic (or nowadays SSD) disk capacity.

1MB of disk space is a decimal million or 1,000,000 bytes.

1MB of RAM is 2 to the power of 20 (a 'binary million') which in decimal is 1,048,576 bytes.

HDD manufacturers have always quoted capacities in decimal but using the suffixes KB/MB/GB etc. The IT industry has always accepted that a RAM megabyte is not the same as a HDD megabyte, the same applies to gigabytes and terabytes.

redron74

coylemj wrote: »

You're suggesting that there is a level of trickery which is not true. 1KB and 1MB have different meanings when dealing with binary-addressible memory (RAM) and magnetic (or nowadays SSD) disk capacity.

1MB of disk space is a decimal million or 1,000,000 bytes.

1MB of RAM is 2 to the power of 20 (a 'binary million') which in decimal is 1,048,576 bytes.

HDD manufacturers have always quoted capacities in decimal but using the suffixes KB/MB/GB etc. The IT industry has always accepted that a RAM megabyte is not the same as a HDD megabyte, the same applies to gigabytes and terabytes.

Well, the OP is probably using his operating system to read the capacity of his disk. Any operating system I have ever used has measured 1KB as being 1024B (and 1MB=1024KB, 1GB=1024MB, 1TB=1024GB). This is why disk manufacturers put a message on the packaging saying the capacity quoted by the operating system may be less than what they quote on the package, usually giving an explanation of their interpretation of 1GB (1,000,000,000 Bytes).

However, it is more than likely that the OP has a hidden partition on his disk containing a backup factory image which can be used in a system restore procedure. This is the most likely explanation for the "missing" 19.5GB. Depending on the methods used by the system manufacturer, this partition may or may not be accessible through Windows. On some systems this partition is only accessible by entering a special recovery/repair mode.
If it doesn't show up in My Computer, then evidence of its existence can probably be found in the Management Console, found under Administrative Tools in the Control Panel. (Don't mess with things in there unless you know what you are doing, as you could easaily cause major problems in your Windows installation.)
What capacity does the BIOS show for this disk?

28064212

coylemj wrote: »

The IT industry has always accepted that a RAM megabyte is not the same as a HDD megabyte

That's not quite true, different parts of the industry have used different reference systems. If it had always been consistent, then there would be no issue at all.

coylemj

redron74 wrote: »

Well, the OP is probably using his operating system to read the capacity of his disk.

I wasn't responding to the OP, I was responding to another poster whom I quoted.

redron74 wrote: »

Any operating system I have ever used has measured 1KB as being 1024B (and 1MB=1024KB, 1GB=1024MB, 1TB=1024GB).

I think you'll find that that only applies to RAM. Operating systems use the decimal rule for HDD capacity, same as the HDD manufacturers.

redron74 wrote: »

However, it is more than likely that the OP has a hidden partition on his disk containing a backup factory image which can be used in a system restore procedure.

Already suggested by myself and another poster in the 2nd and 3rd posts above.

28064212

coylemj wrote: »

I think you'll find that that only applies to RAM. Operating systems use the decimal rule for HDD capacity, same as the HDD manufacturers.

No they don't. Well OS X switched with v10.6 and up, but Windows, OSX <10.6 and Linux all use the binary definitions for HDDs

coylemj

28064212 wrote: »

That's not quite true, different parts of the industry have used different reference systems. If it had always been consistent, then there would be no issue at all.

Sorry but any HDD manufacturer using binary millions would be selling themselves short so none of them do it.

What I mean is that if I manufacture a HDD with 222,000,000 bytes capacity, using decimal millions I'd quote the capacity as 222MB capacity whereas if I used binary millions, I'd have to quote the capacity as 212MB.

redron74

redron74 wrote: »

Well, the OP is probably using his operating system to read the capacity of his disk. Any operating system I have ever used has measured 1KB as being 1024B (and 1MB=1024KB, 1GB=1024MB, 1TB=1024GB). This is why disk manufacturers put a message on the packaging saying the capacity quoted by the operating system may be less than what they quote on the package, usually giving an explanation of their interpretation of 1GB (1,000,000,000 Bytes).

coylemj wrote: »

I think you'll find that that only applies to RAM. Operating systems use the decimal rule for HDD capacity, same as the HDD manufacturers.

What OS are you using?
I suggest you take a few seconds and check the capacity of your own hard disk.

I am on a Windows Vista Business Edition machine at the moment. The capacity of the main partition on the primary disk is 230GB, which it translates as 247,959,908,352 Bytes (almost 248GB in decimal terms, the disk manufacturers' standard). The other 2 billion Bytes are in the recovery partition, which on this old HP workstation, is visible in My Computer.

28064212

coylemj wrote: »

Sorry but any HDD manufacturer using binary millions would be selling themselves short so none of them do it.

HDD manufacturers are one part of the industry. OS manufacturers are another part, and use the different binary system, which is exactly what I said

PrzemoF

mickmac76 wrote: »

Hi
I just got a new laptop delivered today from laptops direct. The laptop was advertised as having a hard drive of 750GB. When I powered it up I found the total capacity of the drive is 679GB. I know the drive is always smaller than the advertised size but is 70GB lower excessive or would it be considered pretty normal.

Mick.

If you made a typo and it's actually 697 GB then everything is OK

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

starlit

Seems normal enough the system files and applications on it already take up memory so expect that from c drive off hard drive. You have option of expandable hard drive and expandable memory ie memory usb sticks and cds if you got cd drive.

riclad

I have win7, drive c ,in my computer says ,
235gig.
NO other partition is shown.
in admin,storage, it says partition2 100meg,
partition 3, 15gig approx ,Recovery partition.
Contains win7 recovery os.