hd size (weird)

Cr8or

i just bought a new hard drive a 40 gigger but its only sowing up as a37.2 gig drive any 1 know what could be wrong

it has happened to all my drives they lookse about 500 mb - 3 gigs no partitions or nothing.

can any 1 help

Ruu_Old

hmm not sure .. u said the drive was new..before that i thot it mite be bad sectors taking over the memory blocks..hardly tho..

halfab

Sorry to say , but there is nothing wrong with your drive.
Its the way harddrive manufacturers quote harddrive sizes.
They use 1000 as their units so your drive is 40 x 1000 x1000 x 1000 (thousand million) bytes in size. Windows reports sizes in units of 1024 (binary reasons will go into detail if asked)
so your drive is reported is reported correctly .

37.2 Gigabytes = 40 thousand million bytes is a correct figure

go figure

Later

Makaveli

yeah thats true. I thought dell had ripped me off by only giving me 37.2gb then I remembered how bytes differ to gb on the computer and checked to see if bytes = 40,000,000 and they did

po0k

Just to throw in a useless bit of info....
If we were to be truely accurate and anally retentive we'd say 'Gibibytes' and 'Mibibytes'
Its 2^xx.
I think 2^20 is a Gibibyte/GigaByte

Just a useless fact

CDs use another method, which i'm not too sure of cos I've never bothered to look it up, Apples and Amigas use yet different systems too. As does linux.

Inspector Gadget

...I thought all the Hdd manufacturers were doing was rounding off 1,048,576 (the number of bytes in a megabyte - 2^20) to a clean 1 million, and similarly for gigabytes (which are otherwise 2^30 bytes) to a clean US billion (damn confusing that - AFAIK a US billion is a thousand million, whereas a UK billion is a million million - go figure), so that their drives could appear slightly bigger?

As far as I know, a megabyte is a megabyte is a megabyte, no matter what OS you're using, except when buying hard disks. But then again I think the companies in question realised that noone would miss a couple of megabytes either way.

Also, there's the matter of where you read the value from, Cr8or (by the way, is that meant to be "creator" or "crater"? It looks like it's meant to be the former but sounds like the latter when "spoken"... woops, I'm missing something... Ah! Yes! The point! :rolleyes: ) What I'm trying to say is that if you got that figure from the BIOS, then it's an accurate representation of the actual size of the disk. If you got it from Windows (unless it's from the disk manager thingy, AFAIK), it's telling you how much space there is after formatting, and since formatting is always going to cost a couple of percentage points of the disk's total capacity, you'd expect the final number to be a little smaller.

Just my 2c...
Gadget

Giblet

I thought 1,000,000,000 is a billion everywhere:
are you sure the UK think 1,000,000,000,000 is a billion.

PiE

<OT>
Yea, so an English Billionaire is 1000 times richer than an American Billionaire (ignoring currency value)?

Eh?
</OT>

Inspector Gadget

Here are the two references in the Oxford English Dictionary on the subject (http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/00022111):

1. orig. and still commonly in Great Britain: A million millions. (= U.S. trillion.)
2. In U.S., and increasingly in Britain: A thousand millions.

...I think the first definition above is falling into disuse (under the influence of our American neighbo(u)rs), but it's still there or thereabouts. Perhaps I'm just showing my age :rolleyes:

Gadget

bonkey

I could be wrong, but I seem to recall there being some regulations instroduced on HD sizing whereby slightly different notation had slightly different meanings.

If I recall it correctly....

If a HD capacity is billed as MB or GB, then it is using decimal-based calculations. If it states Gigabyte or Megabyte, then it uses binary based calculations - which is what the OS will also use.

There may also be the same distinction between MegaByte and Megabyte...

In short - its an industry-wide marketing move which gained legal acceptance (surprise surprise) but which still confuses everyone and their dog.

jc

Cr8or

ok cool thanks