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Lost 18GB

F

foxnews

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 9, 2006
Messages
378
I just bought a popular 250GB Western Digital from newegg. I installed window XP without SP1/2 and it recognized only 120GB. after installing XP, I installed SP2 and went to disk Management to partition the rest but it shows only the followings:

partition 1: 117GB
partition 2: 115GB

total: 232GB

where is the other 18GB?

thanks
 
Harddrive space "lost" due to the decimal to binary conversion. There are many other posts on this and I believe a more detailed explanation in the answerst sticky.
 
Thats the formatted capacity....there is no more...
My 74 Raptors show as 69 gig..my 80 gigs show as 74....
 
Crosshairs said:
Thats the formatted capacity....there is no more...
My 74 Raptors show as 69 gig..my 80 gigs show as 74....
Click to expand...

What do you mean by "there is no more"?
so you lost 5GB on your Raptors?
 
HDD space is advertised (as it would say on the retail box if you had gotten one) as MegaByte = 10^6 Bytes and GigaByte =10^9 Bytes.

Windows uses MegaByte (MegaBinary MiB) to denote 1024^2 Bytes while GigaBytes (GigaBinary GiB) denotes 1024^3 Bytes.

So your HDD has 250,000,000,000 Bytes of space (as advertised by the HDD company) and Windows sees all of this, however it will tell you that you have
250 * 10^6 / (1024^3) GiB of space, which is less than 250.

and yes, the sticky clears this up.

foxnews said:
What do you mean by "there is no more"?
so you lost 5GB on your Raptors?
Click to expand...
an no, neither you nor him lost space. You can store (more of less by a small margin attributable to defect sectors etc) exactly 250,000,000,000 Bytes on that HDD.

On my machine, it even says (74GB raptor)
Capacity 74,340,044,800 bytes (69.2 GB)
 
Formatting has nothing to do with it.

defakto has given you the correct answer, foxnews.

You bought a drive that's 250,000,000,000 bytes. WD calls this "250 gigabytes". It's 250 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 bytes.

You got it working in your OS, and saw 115 + 117 == 232 gigabytes. But that's binary, so it's really 232 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes, which is 249,108,103,168 bytes, which is pretty much 250,000,000,000 bytes.

If you read the fine print on the drive's spec sheet, you'll find that they explain "giga" means the SI standard 10^9, while your OS thinks "giga" means 2^30.
 
I love these posts... all one giga of them ^^ because thats how many of them there are :)

drizzt81 gave you the formula, and its available everywhere online also.

welcome to the computer world
 
well, I knew window display capacity less than the drive spec, such as flash usb memory or any other memory.

but I did not know there is a big difference between HHD capacity spec and window reading.
 
so my Western Digital drive is working as it supposed to? there is nothing wrong with it?
 
foxnews said:
well, I knew window display capacity less than the drive spec, such as flash usb memory or any other memory.
Click to expand...
This isn't true, Foxnews. The capacity is correct; it's just represented in a different unit.
 
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