My USB Drive Is Missing Some Space?

[JOKER_JOKER]

I hope this is in the right section.
I recently decided to try out linux for my first time. I picked out Damn Small Linux, and I put it on my USB drive. After a while I realized that I needed my USB drive to transfer some mp3's so I tried to just format the drive in windows. It worked but it only showed up as being 50mb, the size of DSL, (my USB drive is 1gb). I put DSL onto a cd and booted it up and realized that my usb drive was partitioned and the other partition wasn't showing up in windows. So I combined the partitions, and formatted it. Now its fine but it seems that some space is missing. It shows up with only 975mb. Is this normal? If its not, how do I find out where the extra space went?

 

[iSkylla]

Yes, 1GB = 1024 MB, you will lose some space.

 

[JOKER_JOKER]

No, I mean AFTER I deleted DSL. I deleted everything, now nothing is on my USB. But it only shows that I have 975mb. Thats 49mb missing, and I'd like to know where it went.

 

[iSkylla]

I dont know the technical answer, but you will always lose some space. Like my 300GB HD only has 279GB.

 

[xrdotimcr]

When you format, you lose space. Simple as that. How much space you lose can depend on what type of filesystem you use. FAT32, FAT16, etc.
For example.
My 60 gig HDD when formatted using FAT32, comes out to roughly 55 gigs
Using NTFS, roughly 54 gigs.

 

[Murali]

The "technical" answer is that the ACTUAL space and ADVERTISED space are different.

How, you ask?

Well, companies use 1000 mb as the definition of 1 gb in their advertising scheme... So when you buy a 300 gb hd.

From Western Digital/Samsung/Hitachi/HDD Manufacturers stand point, this is 300 * 1000 mb.

However, your computer (and reality) see that 1 gb is 1024 mb... So, this equates to some missing space.

 

[JOKER_JOKER]

That answers a lot thanx. And just for your info, I'm using a FAT32 file system.

 

[Unknown-One]

I've seen USB thumbdrives that come out at almost their total advertised size, but lose space if you actualy reformat them. Any way to explain that? Is the way Windows formats more space costly?

 

[Laforge]

A Megabyte by definition, is 2^20 or 1,048,576 bytes.

A megabyte, by manufacturer definition, is 1,000,000 bytes [this is the same in the harddrive section. In fact, I've made a reply to one of the stickies on this very subject]


This is true of usb keys, this is true of floppies, this is true of cd's, dvd's, harddrives..etc
a gigabyte, mathematically, is 1,073,741,824 bytes
manufacturer gigabytes are 1,000,000,000 bytes


1 "manufacturers" gigabyte (1,000,000,000) / 1 "real" gigabyte (1,073,741,824) = a factor of 0.9313


So.. whenever you look at an advertised space of a storage device.. subtract around 7 PERCENT, and you'll get the real space.

200gb hdd? = 186 "Real" gigs

512mb ipod shuffle? 476 megs.

 

[Marduk]

I'm curious if anyone knows why HDD size in xbytes and RAM size in xbytes are different.


128mb hdd space = maybe 110mb actual size.
128mb RAM = 131mb actual size...

 

[Axman]

You could be reading it the opposite way with RAM. When your motherboard POSTs it tells you that you've got 1024kb or 1,073,741,824b assuming that you have a gig of ram, so you might be inclined to round off the superfluous digits and forget that it's all binary written in decimal; that or your board is running registered memory. Registered memory has more bits per byte for it's internal error-checking.

Then you get into the deal where BIOSes can vary wildly and display the same data in ways that are so elementally different that it would appear to be summarily different data.

That, and old computers, say, six+ years ago, used DIM modules, which actually varied from manufacturer or even just batch how much information exactly constituted 128mb, or whatever the amount was. . .but don't ask me why or how. I was fairly astonished with the finding when I was testing a bunch of RAM around here.

 

[Marduk]

I know it reads the other way.


RAM is sold as 128mb w/ the binary digits giving a higher number than it's marketed as. (134mb by the calculator)

HDD is sold as 128mb w/ the binary digits giving a lower number than it's marketed as. (122mb by the calculator)


The question isn't how it's being rounded, but why they're rounded different ways...

 

[Bullitt]

I thought my thumbdrives were fat16 formatted.....

Going to NTFS would kill that extra space quick. I could be wrong, but I cannot verify as my 'nix box seems to have lost its mind about whether or not the drive is plugged in.