200 GB and beyond! lol

Heya,
First off, I'm a computer software specialist here in Utah. And yes, I really am a major geek. But in a good way. Hehehe.
Anyways, I have a question: I just installed an additional hard drive into my computer last night (200 GB..... ). But because of those normal things it likes to do, I'm only getting 186 GB out of it. Does anyone have any idea how I can improve my disk utilization?
Thanks....
newgroove

 

this may apply to your situation
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013

 

If he's getting 186Gb, he's got 48-bit LBA enabled, doesn't he?

The 14Gb are just used up by formatting. Your 200Gb hard drive needs some room to store the file allocation table. That's where it went. It depends on the type of file system you use, but usually hard drives use up around 8% of the total space for formatting. I don't think there is anyway you can use all 200Gb of the drive for discretionary storage.

 

In addition to space lost due to formatting (which is neglible relative to the size of the drive) all HDD advertise their drives with 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 Bytes (and they all explicitly say as much). Operating systems, on the other hand, use 1 GB = 1,024^3 Bytes, or 1,073,741,824
Bytes (this is more correctly called 1 GiB, but this nomenclature is new).

In any case, you have 200 GB and 186 GiB.

200 GB = 200,000,000,000 bytes

200,000,000,000 bytes / 1,073,741,824 bytes per GiB = 186.3 GiB

 

No! This is the standard 1000 to 1024 conversion problem. The advertised volume is using metric 1000 to convert to Kilo, Mega and then Giga. Whereas the Windows system uses 1024 as the multiplier.

200GB is 200000000000B then divide by successive 1024 multipliers to get 186.264 GB!

 

pwned!

 

Definitely, great minds think alike...

 

you're right.. the limit pre sp1 is 137G.. dunno wtf I was thinking.. carry on. I'm gonna go put the dunce hat on.

 

well cool...that all makes sense now. thanks guys.

 

Can i get a picture of you with that on?

 

No. .