WindowsXP incorrect reporting of HDD size

T

tornadotsunamilife

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Jun 26, 2004
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Quick question.

This may be more of a hard drive thing but I personally believe it's windows fault. Basically XP reports I have a HDD with the total size of 186GB ( it's a 200GB drive), what happened to my other 14GB's???
 
Hard drive manufacturers report there drives as 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes, while Windows actually reports 1 GB as being 1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30). Then there's also space being taken up by the file system.
 
Drive manufacturers do it based on the decimal definition of 1 GB, being 1,000,000,000 bytes, or 1,000MB. Windows does it based on the binary definition of 1GB being 1,073,741,824 bytes, or 1,024MB. Basically your 200GB drive, reported by the mfg equals 200,000,000,000 bytes...or 195,312,500MB before formatting. So in actuality you're missing about 9.3GB, which is most likely from formatting with NTFS and overhead. My 300GB drive was 279GB after formatting.
 
HDD Maker: 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes
Actual binary value: 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes

This distinction is made in all marketing literature for HDDs (OEM catalogs, retail boxes, etc)

If you divide 300 by 1.073741824, you get 279.3967723846435546875 (to be fairly precise :p)
 
I was waiting for DL to come in here and shed some ultra precision on this thread. =)
 
ah... I remember the times when such knowledge was imparted to me. We all learn that one sometime.
 
DVAmon said:
I was waiting for DL to come in here and shed some ultra precision on this thread. =)
Click to expand...
I may sig that...

For claiming such precision, I neglected to observe that the OP said he had a _2_00GB drive...whoops :p

How about 186.264514923095703125GB? :D
 
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