500 GB drive with only 466GB?

Hi Folks,

I moved my old hard drive (about 1.5 years old) to a new computer. I did a quick format of it. Looking under Disk Management, it shows the drive as only having 466 GB available, despite it's being a 500 GB drive (a hitachi HTS725050A9A364).

Have that many bad sectors been written out of it? Should I buy a new drive? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm trying to put all my old files back on the drive from the backup, and they somehow don't fit anymore! crazy.

thanks,
allie

Win 7 Pro x64
Thinkpad T410

 

Your drive is showing up normally for a 500gb drive in Windows. I don't see how you could be missing too much space except maybe the 1.17gb used as the system drive.

It has to do with the way Windows calculates a Gb versus how the HD manufacturer calculates a Gb. It has always been controversial.

Windows says a Gb is 1,073,741,824 bytes while the manufacturer says a Gb is 1,000,000,000 bytes. The manufacturer is going by the metric system and Windows is going by a computer design standard.

So on a 500,000,000,000 byte drive the
Manufacturer calls it: 500,000,000,000 divided by 1,000,000,000 =500Gb
Windows calls it: 500,000,000,000 divided by 1,073,741824 = 465.66Gb

You are able to use all the space on the hard drive (all 500,000,000,000 bytes) it is just Windows says that it takes more bytes to make a Gb so there are less total Gb on the hard drive than the manufacturer states on the box.

The manufacturer can get away with it because they are just using the metric system to define a gigabyte and some computer software uses the 1,000,000,000 bytes = 1gb standard too. "Other software, like Mac OS X 10.6[2] and some components of the Linux kernel[3] measure using the decimal units." Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

 

Plus, expect to lose more 'space' once you format it.

(I'm going to save this sach2, excellent!)

 

I knew this and thought about saying something................. but how does that explain why the OP can't fit the files originally on the drive? The 1.17GB system partition? I've never even SEEN a 1.17GB system partition. Windows 7 makes a 100MB partition (for some odd reason).

 

I don't see how countchoula can be missing any appreciable amount of space if the HD was formatted in Windows before. Windows will always calculate a 500gb drive to be about 466gb.

The 1.17 system_drv seems to be a Lenovo thing but I am not sure what it does or why it is so much bigger than a standard Win 7 system partition. http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo-ibm/471263-questions-about-deleting-system_drv-partition.html

 

That's W7's recovery partition. That will only be created if W7 is the first OS loaded on C: drive, otherwise say in a multi boot, it will not be created.

As to the usable drive size, a formatted drive will always be smaller than an unformatted one. Formatting the thing takes up some space, besides what sach2 said.

 

Multiply your UN-formatted Hard Drive capacity by 0.93 for a rough guide to your formatted capacity.

For example, 500 gigs x 0.93 equals 450-460 gigs roughly.
My Seagate 500 gigs (unformatted) formats to 465 gigs in Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit OS.

Bazza

 

thanks for all the feedback, folks. Sounds like i don't have to buy myself a new drive - phew.

I'm not sure what's going on with all my space being chewed up. Might have to do with how I'm copying all my files over. Perhaps xxcopy is making duplicates of files that are actually in short-cutted directories? Dunno - i'll look into it and report back. Thanks again!

 

That is an easy way to do the math. I just figured this out last night. You lose about 7gb for each 100gb listed on the box.

 

Or 7%. :-D

Bazza