hey where'd my gigs go?

[MaxDepth]

I recently bought a 120 gig Western Digital drive from a hot deals thread and now I'm scratching my head as to the missing gigabytes on my drive.

Anyway, now that I have it home and installing it now, I have a question. How come my bios (and Win2K disk manager) is showing it as 112 gb hard drive. I know for sector allocations that 1 meg is actually 1.024 megs - so shouldn't it be at least 122 gb? Where did my 8 gigs go? Sector allocation for NTFS and Fat32 should be that big? What can I do?

 

[LED]

Originally posted by: MaxDepth
I recently bought a 120 gig Western Digital drive from a hot deals thread and now I'm scratching my head as to the missing gigabytes on my drive.

Anyway, now that I have it home and installing it now, I have a question. How come my bios (and Win2K disk manager) is showing it as 112 gb hard drive. I know for sector allocations that 1 meg is actually 1.024 megs - so shouldn't it be at least 122 gb? Where did my 8 gigs go? Sector allocation for NTFS and Fat32 should be that big? What can I do?

Other way around @ the cost of the HD...so it's right with the Formatting included

 

[Confused]

1 GB in hdd manufacturers is classed as 1,000,000,000 (10^3 x 10^3 x 10^3) bytes.

1 Gibibyte (2^10) is 2^10 x 2^10 x 2^10, which comes out as 1,073,741,824.

120,000,000,000
----------------------
1,073,741,824

= 111.75


Therefore, you have just the right amount of storage space. Did you never wonder why a 4.3GB HDD only gave you 3.99GB? I did, and this is why It's just more pronounced the higher you go


Confused

 

[mrman3k]

Nicely put Confused!

 

[Jeff7]

And what is the difference between Gigabyte and Gigibyte? Is it a mispelling, or is there an actual difference?

 

[prosaic]

<smartass mode>

Gigibyte is either a misspelling or a specific type of wound inflicted by this girl.

A Gibibyte is a whole other thing.

</smartass mode>

I have nothing important to contribute. Sorry. I couldn't resist the temptation to be an ass. It's the only way the middle aged have of asserting themselves any more.

- pro

 

[MaxDepth]

Thanks Confused!


Now I will be able to tell others with confidence (and math!) to expect about 93% of true disk allocation from advertised size.


I wonder if this size issue will work with girls this weekend...
:Q

 

[Peter]

Originally posted by: Jeff7
And what is the difference between Gigabyte and Gigibyte? Is it a mispelling, or is there an actual difference?

We have real binary gigabytes versus marketing gigabytes here. In computers, one kilobyte has always been 1024 bytes ...

... which gives us the reverse situation in RAM - if you buy a gigabyte of RAM, you actually get 1.07something billion bytes.

 

[RobCur]

because to them 1meg = 1 000 000 byte, 1gig = 1,000,000,000 bytes. haha! when your computer convert them to binary it will be proportionally smaller... are we cheated? hell yes!!! It's the way they format the harddrive too. They can make it exactly say 40gigs or 40,000,000,000 bytes which will equals 37.2gb but they chose byte because it easier to work with... and you get less as harddrive grow in sizes.