Bobby Posted October 28, 2007 Report Share Posted October 28, 2007 Why is it that we cant use the entire disk i understand that the mbr taakes up some room but i have a 40 gb har drive and i only us 37.2 gb of it. Does anyone know why? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scarthy © ® ™ Posted October 28, 2007 Report Share Posted October 28, 2007 It's what happens with HDD's. The actual size is always slightly smaller. eg - a 250GB HDD = 232GB actual size. I'm not 100% sure why, file system related (FAT/NTFS etc.) or just how it is? It's the same story with USB drives as well. Maybe they are just 'ripping us off' with what we pay for? ;)Anyone else know why this is? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scarthy © ® ™ Posted October 28, 2007 Report Share Posted October 28, 2007 Found it (I think). Something to do with the marketing trickery that redefined the gigabyte to 1,000,000,000 bytes (instead of the proper 1,073,741,824 bytes)! So they are 'ripping us off really'! ;)Apparently there have been lawsuits against manufacturers Have a look here ! Progress eh ?!?! :( Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rong Posted October 28, 2007 Report Share Posted October 28, 2007 Capacity measurementsA disassembled and labeled 1996 hard drive.A disassembled and labeled 1996 hard drive.The capacity of an HDD can be calculated by multiplying the number of cylinders by the number of heads by the number of sectors by the number of bytes/sector (most commonly 512). On ATA drives bigger than 8 gigabytes, the values are set to 16383 cylinder, 16 heads, 63 sectors for compatibility with older operating systems. It should be noted that the values for cylinder, head & sector reported by a modern drive are not the actual physical parameters since, amongst other things, with zone bit recording the number of sectors varies by zone.Hard disk drive manufacturers specify disk capacity using the SI prefixes mega, giga, and tera and their abbreviations M, G and T, respectively. Byte is typically abbreviated B.Operating systems frequently report capacity using the same abbreviations but in reference to binary-based units. For instance, the prefix mega in the context of data storage can mean 220 (1,048,576), which is approximately equal to the actual value of the SI prefix mega, 106 (1,000,000). Similar usage has been applied to prefixes of greater magnitude. This results in a discrepancy between the disk manufacturer's stated capacity and the apparent capacity of the drive when examined from the operating system. The difference becomes much more noticeable in the multi-gigabyte range. For example, Microsoft Windows reports disk capacity both in decimal-based units to 12 or more significant digits and with binary-based units to 3 significant digits. Thus a disk specified by a disk manufacturer as a 30 GB disk might have its capacity reported by Windows 2000 both as "30,065,098,568 bytes" and "28.0 GB" The disk manufacturer used the SI definition of "giga", 109 to arrive at 30 GB; however, because the utilities provided by Windows define a gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes (230 bytes, often referred to as a gibibyte, or GiB), the operating system reports capacity of the disk drive as 28.0 GB.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk#Capacity_measurements Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
catgate Posted October 28, 2007 Report Share Posted October 28, 2007 As far as I know it is because "in the beginning" there were eight bits to a byte. Each time you double the number you get the progression 8>16>32>64>128>256>512 and so on . Hence 1,000,000,000 is never a true option. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bobby Posted October 28, 2007 Author Report Share Posted October 28, 2007 Thank you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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