I bought a maxtor 40gb hdd and its only 38.1 gb

[Quad]

I went to the store, bought a maxtor 40gb harddisk. Even says 40gb on the maxtor label. I looked up the model number on the maxtor website, and it also says 40gb.

So why is it only 38.1 gb? any ideas?

thx in advance

 

[AMDPwred]

If you haven't noticed, all hard drives do this.

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

I don't think I've ever had a HDD show the rated GB size... Guess that's just what we get for having a boot sector.

 

[Walliser]

This is the same old problem: HD manufacturers count a megabyte as 1000 kilobytes while it is actually 1024kilobytes. I MB is equal to to 2^8 and not 1000.

You'll never get a HD that has the number of MB they advertise.

There are also some other factors such as bad blocks, formatting, clusters etc. But it is mostly due to the different ways of counting the number of bytes in a kilobyte or megabyte resp.

 

[ShadowFox]

thsts completely normal, what is not normal is in my case for your 40gb HD to end up as about 33.5GB, DAMN WESTERN DIGITAL!

 

[Quad]

ok thanks

i was just a little worried. i knew that this was normal, but i hadn't antipicated that the loss could be up to 2 gigs (or in ShadowFox's case, 7 ) . I always thought the loss would be around 1gb

thx for clearing it up

 

[Walliser]

wow, 7 gigs on a 40 gig drive?!? you gotta be kidding me. I think I "lost" about 3 gigs on my 60 gig IBM drive.

I don't think I'll ever buy a WD if that's the case.

 

[AthlonMan]

The bigger the HD you buy the more data you will lose.

But 7 gigs off a 40, I would take that back.

 

[marat]

<< thsts completely normal, what is not normal is in my case for your 40gb HD to end up as about 33.5GB, DAMN WESTERN DIGITAL! >>



2ShadowFox: Do you have windows 2000 and Fat 32? I am asking, because 32GB = 1024*1024*32 = 33'554'432=33.5! It might very well be mistake on your part.

2Quad: 40'000'000 bytes = 1024*1024*38.14 = 38.14GB !

 

[Zenmervolt]

<<The bigger the HD you buy the more data you will lose.>>

Exactly. For a theoretical 1MB drive, you would "lose" 24K. For a 10 MB drive, you "lose" 240K. A 40GB drive is 40,000 MB and when I do the math I get 37.25 GB. (40,000MB = 40,000,000KB = 40,000,000,000B, then 40,000,000,000B/1024 = 390625500KB, 390625500KB/1024 = 38146.97MB, 38146.97MB/1024 = 37.25GB.) This must mean that Maxtor rates things as follows; 1GB = 1000MB, 1MB = 1000KB, 1KB = 1024B. Why they do not consider 1KB to equal 1000B is beyond me.

ZV