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80g hd 74.5g after format?

I

Imdmn04

Platinum Member
so i jumped on the compusa deal today and got myself an 80g hd
after fdisk and format using fat32, i got 74.5g, is that about right? i understand you lose a gig or 2 after formatting, but 4.5g of loss?

at this rate, an 160g hd would lose almost 10g after format.

would using the maxtor software give me more room? it stated on the box to use the maxblast software rather than fdisk, to insure recognition of drive's full capacity

i know im being stingy, shouldnt complain because it was only 100 bucks.

 
HD manufacturers quote sizes in millions of bytes....a GB isnt just a million bytes though, since there are 1024KB in a MB, etc....so the larger the capacity, the more you 'lose' when formatted.

My 80GB is also 74.5GB formatted...its normal.
 
My 40GB Maxtor drive reports 38.1 GB after formatting it with Fat32. I suppose that your 80gb should be around 76gb.
 


<< My 40GB Maxtor drive reports 38.1 GB after formatting it with Fat32. I suppose that your 80gb should be around 76gb. >>

its like robg1701 said above.
 
An 80 gig maxtor for $100 ??? HUH ?

My 80 gig maxtor is 74.5gig. (formatted with MaxBlast II)

When i tried formatting through fdisk just for kicks it came out at 34.7 gigs (!!!)
 
Drive Manufacturers seem to rate a MB as 1000 Bytes

In reality, computers use a MB as 1024 Bytes.

So it carries on and on. That is normal.
 


<< isnt this in the FAQ?

why does that 1 million to 1 mb thing have to be repeated soo often? >>



i know the 1024 to 1000 thing, im just trying to figure out how much loss would result from formatting, not from the 1000-1024 conversion

here is some math i did:
80,000mb/1.024=78125mb=acutal size before formatting using the 1024 structure
78125-74500=3625mb thats lost due to formatting, which now seems reasonable
 


<< It should be exatly 76.3 >>



thats what my promise bios said, but in windows its 74.5
74.5*1.024=76.3, so im guessing the promise bios goes by 1000 not 1024
 
There's nothing unusual about it. Hard drive manufactures sell their drives using the equation 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. However, the computer measures the drive's size using the equation 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes. They're not quite the same, which is why your drive seems to be a little smaller than you expected.

80,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 = 74.506

Hope this helped. 🙂
 
The Promise BIOS is giving you the drive capacity, Windows is giving the formatted capacity. The FAT for large drives takes up a decent amount of space which isn't usable to store data.
 
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