Hard Drive Disk Space?

[galbicake]

I got a 160 GB Seagate HD and I just installed it and it only shows 149GB as available free space.

Is this normal? It seems pretty high to me.

Thanks

 

[desy]

Normal

 

[galbicake]

Thanks.

So in most cases a HD only ran run at 93% capacity at any point in time?

 

[Vegito]

no you're a victim of manufacture calculation advertisement

 

[erwos]

Hard drive manufacturers measure space using the normal definition of "mega" and "giga". Thus, 1 megabyte to them is 1,000,000 bytes. Your OS measures it in base 2. Thus, 1 megabyte is a bit more than 1,000,000 bytes (forget the exact number).

Essentially, it's two different ways of stating the same number, but, confusingly, both ways are called the same thing ("gigabytes").

-Erwos

 

[Vegito]

Read
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60505,00.html

http://www.boingboing.net/2003/10/08/hard_drive_capacity_.html

1,024 Byte = 1 Kilobyte (KB)
1,024 Kilobyte (KB) = 1 Megabyte (MB)
1,073,741,824 Bytes = 1 Gigabyte (GB)
1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1,024 Megabyte (MB)

their 160 gig is 1,073,741,824 * 149 = 159987531776