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Hardrive Question. Neep Help, Please!!!

K

krueL

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 29, 2004
Messages
211
I have recently purchased an external Maxtor 250 gig hardrive. It is 7200 RPM's and has 8 MEG for cache. It runs on USB 2.0. The format of the drive is FAT 32. That was set like that from the factory. Very sweet storage drive. The situation with the hardrive is that Windows XP reconizes it as a 233 Gig hardrive. I know that it is normal that Windows does not show the full amount of the hardrives space. My question is, is there a way to make windows show the full capacity, which is 250, so the space can be used. I remember hearing something in the past that you could do this by messing with the partition of the hardrive. I was just wondering if this is possible and if so is this a dangerous thing to do. Either way I would love to know. Also, this hardrive being formated from the factory with the FAT 32 format, a problem? If I formated this using the NTFS format, would that do anything for me? If you guys could tell me the differences between these 2 differend types of formats and my partitioning question that would be great. I really need this extra space on that hardrive for all of my stuff and could use every gig. Just let me know if its possible and the dangers if any to do this. Thanks.

krueL
 
Formatting the drive for NTFS is always a good idea, you can now have files larger then 4 GBs. However as for utilizing all 250 gigs, it's just not going to happen. I'm not positive, but I do not believe any hard drive external or internal allows to you use all of the space it's said to have. I forget why, something to do with the disk sectors.
 
Hard drive manufacturers state the size of the hard drive as 250GB, which means that the actual size of the drive is 250,000,000,000 bytes, or very close to it. Windows sees 250,000,000,000 bytes, but reports it as 233gb. The reason for this is that computers by necessity use 2 as their base number for calculation. We use base 10.

1kb = 1,024 bytes
1mb = 1,024 bytes x 1,024 = 1,048,576 bytes
1gb = 1,024mb x 1,024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes

250,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,823 = 232.83 GB in base 2.
 
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