Hard Drive HELP Please!

[{NcsO}ReichstaG]

Hey,
I have three questions:
1) I have a 120 GB SeaGate Barracuda 7200.7 hard drive. However, under Windows XP PRO, it only shows up as a 111 GB hard drive. What happened to the other 9 GB?

2) One day I partitioned my hard drive with (I believe Norton Partion Magic) and installed a trial Windows 2003 server. However, I later discocvered that Intel did not release drivers for my motherboard that work with Windows 2003. As a result, I formatted my HD and merged everything back together, under one partition. However, when I boot up my computer, I still have this annoying option to switch boot between my Windows XP Pro and Windows 2003. How do I get rid of it?

3) Performance wise, how does a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 compare with a WD 10,000 RPM Raptor? Is the performance difference only marginal, or is it like night and day?

Thanks For your Help!

 

[DougLite]

1. Conversion from decimal to binary. It's still a 120GB drive - in decimal gigabytes, ie 1,000,000,000 bytes. 1 binary gigabyte = 1,073,741,824 bytes. Those 73 million bytes you lose out of every GB pile up as drives get bigger.

2. Edit C:\boot.ini (make sure you have recovery console and a backup of the file ready in case you delete the wrong entry and make your system unbootable) Remove the entry for 2003.

3. DiamondMax10 with 16MB buffer right? Not much difference in most single user tasks, although the 73GB Raptor is in the 10-15% faster range. DM10 is faster than the 36GB Raptor, at a much higher density and better price per GB.

Any more questions?

 

[{NcsO}ReichstaG]

Thanks For your help?
So would you reccommand a DM10 w/16 MB buffer over a raptor?

 

[DougLite]

If you need more than 70GB.