Formatting a new 4 TB HD

[rinaldo00]

I just installed a new Seagate ST4000VN000 4TB 64MB SATA 6GB/S NAS Hard Drive as my second STORAGE ONLY drive. I formatted it as one partition, NTFS, allocation size 4096 under Win 7 64 bit.

The HD shows up with 206 MB used, 3.63 TB free. I know windows sets aside some room for the recyle bin and other stuff, but is 206 MB normal? That is 1% I have never used a drive this large bfore.

 

[uOpt]

It's the log.

 

[SirMaster]

1%?

1% of 4TB is 40GB.

200MB is 0.005% of 4TB.

3.63TiB is 3.991TB
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3.63TiB+in+TB

 

[westrock2000]

It's set aside for feature like Bitlocker. It's not needed for a lot of people, but at the same time it hardly matters.

 

[rinaldo00]

OK, now I am really confused about what is going on. Let me post some images.

Here is the drive's properties

Here is where I got the 1% full from, it is a directory utility (I did not do the math, you are correct 1% is 40 GB) I have it set to show hidden files, yet it claims 1 item is hidden

Where did you get TiB from?

 

[Snowknight26]

You aren't showing protected/system files.

The space is being used by the System Volume Information folder.

 

[rinaldo00]

You aren't showing protected/system files.

The space is being used by the System Volume Information folder.

Yeah that is it, I had it set to show hidden files but I forgot to turn on system files. I now see it as the $RECYCLE.BIN But why is the drive showing 1% full? Is Win 7 is measuring in TiB and not TB?

 

[drescherjm]

Is Win 7 is measuring in TiB and not TB?

Windows measures in TiB but uses the TB unit. This is why it does not say your drive is a 4TB drive which it clearly is by having a little more than 4 trillion bytes.

 

[rinaldo00]

Windows measures in TiB but uses the TB unit. This is why it does not say your drive is a 4TB drive which it clearly is by having a little more than 4 trillion bytes.

Well that is confusing since I can CLEARLY see TB not TiB on the chart. That is why I was wondering what was going on.

 

[Snowknight26]

But why is the drive showing 1% full?

Rounding.

 

[SirMaster]

Looks like it's rounding up to 1% when it's really closer to 0.005%.

And yep Windows reports in TiB while using the TB label. This is always cause for lots of confusion.

4 terabytes is 4 trillion bytes at least according to NIST.

 

[Britgeezer]

Ratios look OK to me based on my 3TB drives

 

[jabbernotty]

I was under the impression that it is a bad idea to use A and B as drive letters because Windows still treats those in a special way, because they used to be assigned to floppy disks.
Microsoft says

if your computer does not have floppy disk drives, you can assign A and B to volumes

(here) so I suppose it doesn't matter anymore.