External Harddrives and powercords?

K

Kewel

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Aug 3, 2006
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Yesterday my new External harddrive arrived, and I was faced with a couple of dissapointments. First of all, advertised size of the drive is 360GB, but windows only says that there is 298GB there - is that normal? And secondly, the harddrive came with a power cord and an adapter... I assumed it gets all the power it needs from the USB cable... Is it also normal that the external harddrives come with powercords?
 
The only drive + enclosure I've seen personally that didn't have a cord and possibly a power brick is a Western Digital Passport drive a client of mine had. It was fairly small, had a 2.5" drive in it. I think it was 120gb.
 
only 2.5" drives can be power driven by the USB. 3.5 can be powered by Firewire, but no one wants to make an enclosure for that.
 
and about the gigs... theres some formula out there to see how much space you're going to have after windows formats it. I can't remember what it is exactly, but i THINK the simpler version is .93 times the size of the drive.

.93 x 360 = 334

so, i think my little equation is wrong LOL.

someone else will chime in with the correct calculation and the reason why. something like the drive is in binary and windows does something else or something... i dunno LOL
 
your math's correct. .93 = (1000/1024)^3, which is the decimal-binary gigabyte conversion. The formatting overhead should be minimal, so there's definately something else going on.
 
yeah, it is most likely a 320gb drive. To my knowledge no one makes a 360 gb hd.

If it is in fact a 320, then the decimal->binary and FS overhead puts the formatted size of a 320 at 298 gigs.
 
drives are made in gigabytes and windows reads the drive as gigabinary
 
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