How much space should you lose after formating?

[squig6]

I just installed a 120 gig hard drive and after using fdisk and format windows is displaying that I have only 111 gig of space on my hard drive.

 

[LS20]

depends on the file system...

but anyways,when a man ufactere says 120gb, they mean 120,000,000Kb (or kb, whatever...) .... which amounts to whatever amount that youre being shown now.



because 1mb = 1024Kb and not 1000

 

[squig6]

Thanks

 

[Bglad]

HD 1mb=1000 kb
Windows 1mb=1024 kb
or something like that.

I can't remember exactly but theres a formula. Except that mathematically should give you 117G, but I know 117G is not right. It doesn't seem to add up the way I'm thinking of it but your ratio is perfectly normal. Whenever you buy a HD figure usable space is 7-8 percent smaller than the box says.

[edit]
oops didn't see ls20's numbers there at the bottom before

 

[tunes4life]

U could try formatting with the "format C:/u" command.

 

[Bglad]

I found it by accident while doing something else.

HD manufacturers figure binary 1MB = 1,000,000 bytes
OS figures 1MB = 1,048,576 bytes, something about memory boundaries causes this

120G / 1,048,576 = 114.4G

Then you'll lose some more in the MBR and formatting.

I get 37.2G out of my 40G drive so you're loss percentage is almost exactly the same.

 

[WarCon]

Does seem a little like false advertising, always has, but I guess the software engineers thought it would of been too difficult to have it display the same way the manufacturers figure it........... I once tried to explain this to a friend who just bought a 30gig drive and he partitioned it into like 7 drives (don't ask me why, not a clue), but after adding it all up he kept wanting me to help him find the missing 2 gigs.

 

[ttn1]

Actually the correct number of Gigabytes with a definition of 1024Bytes=1KB, 1024KB=1MB, 1024MB=1GB is:

120,000,000,000/1024*1024*1024=111.76GB

So just about exactly what you were told you have. Assuming it said 111GB on the nose, then you lost about
760MB to the file system, which isn't bad for that amount of space.

The harddrive size fiasco has been going on for quite sometime.

 

[DaiShan]

ttn1 has it right on the money, and for the extra space taht you "lost" that goes to the file system, I think I have read that a ntfs partiion saves a lil more space than a FAT32, I believe andy hui has a faq on this somewhere.

 

[cholley]

this wasn't such an issue when drives were 2 gig with drives the size they are today we are seeing up to a 10 gig discrepancy in advertized space and useable space so i think it's time they change the standard by which the label and sell hard drives

 

[Mark R]

From a purist's point of view, the hard drives are labeled and sold correctly - it's the computer that is reporting the space incorrectly.

 

[DaiShan]

mark R I disagree, I don't think either is incorrect per se, but the fact is there are 8 bits to a byte, 1024bytes to a kbyte,1024 kbytes to a mbyte 1024 mbytes to a gbyte, 1024gbytes to the terabyte....etc. so physically that is how much data they can hold, however companies like to make it easier on their consumers by dumbing it down a little, rounding down to exactly 1000, it is much easier to sell a hdd that is "120 gb" as opposed to 111gb 760mb.

 

[Bglad]

I have to agree with Mark R.

The HD does indeed have 120G or whatever its advertised space in binary. The discrepancy comes based on how the file system and operating system reads and uses that memory. This is user and system dependant.

If HD manufacturers want truth in advertising, they would say on the box:
120G HD = x amount of space in x OS
listing different systems.

But this is just confusing to the average consumer who never comes close to filling big drives and doesn't much care. People posting on these boards are not your average consumer and make up a very small percentage of the revenues for HD manufacturers. On the other end of the scale are IT buyers who know what they are doing and don't need that info spelled out for them. The marketing decision is probably the right one even though a small number of people will notice the size difference and be confused.

Well, I guess I agree with both of you... sort of.

 

[dbwillis]

Both of the 2 -120gb WD drives came out to 111.79 GB (NTFS)
I assume the 3rd one I get tomorrow will be the same :0)

 

[Pauli]

MarkR and Bglad -
NO, NO, NO! This issue has been around ever since we first started seeing 10MB and 20MB PC hard drives, circa 1982, before you guys were probably even born. I remember having these same questions with my first hard drive, the Seagate ST225 20MB model (that sucker costed US$300!).

The "120GB" hard drive is indeed 111.67GB. It's the Hard Drive manufacturer's who have "redefined" what a Kilobyte, Megabyte, and Gigabyte mean. These are well-defined, exact units of measure based on the x86 microprocessor definition of a byte (using binary arithmetic), not what some marketing dweeb has deemed them to be.

 

[dexmanone]

DaiShan is right: there are 8 bits to a byte, 1024bytes to a kbyte,1024 kbytes to a mbyte 1024 mbytes to a gbyte, 1024gbytes to the terabyte....etc

Other industries do the same thing. A piece of wood, a 2x4, is not 2x4 but more like 1-3/4 x 3-3\4 or something like that. Anyway, as DaiShan says, it's easier to sell and communicate.