Vanishing Hard Drive Space

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by J8son, Oct 2, 2005.

  1. J8son

    J8son Corporal

    I have a 320gig SATA hard drive in my system. I noticed tonight that when I pulled up the pie chart thingie in "My Computer" under Capacity it only has it listed as being 298gig.

    I know the drives always knock off a few gig for system files and things like that but am I right in assuming that over 20gigs should not just vanish?
     
    J8son, Oct 2, 2005
    #1
  2. DavidGP

    DavidGP MajorGeeks Forum Administrator - Grand Pooh-Bah Staff Member

    sadly thats about right, it's all to do with the calculation of what 1gb is, Drive makers have there figure at 1,000,000,000 bytes = 1 Gb but the OS calculates this as 1,073,741,824 bytes = 1 Gb ( the age old binary vs decimal thing )


    Drive size vs formatted size ( rough guide )
    10GB Drive = 9.31GB
    20GB Drive = 18.62GB
    40GB Drive = 37.25GB
    60GB Drive = 55.87GB
    80GB Drive = 74.50GB
    100GB Drive = 93.13GB
    120GB Drive = 111.75GB
    160GB Drive = 149.01GB
    200GB Drive = 186.26GB
    250GB Drive = 232.75GB
    300GB Drive = 279.33GB
    400GB Drive = 372.44GB
    500GB Drive = 465.55GB
     
    DavidGP, Oct 2, 2005
    #2
  3. Jerkyking

    Jerkyking Sergeant Major

    Nice info Halo. This question comes up quite a bit... good "Sticky" info.
     
    Jerkyking, Oct 2, 2005
    #3

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