I have a 30.7Gb HDD but Windows says it's only 28.6Gb.. why?

[swinger9]

When I click on the C: Drive in My computer I'm told the total size of my HDD is only 28.6Gb... I have a 30.7Gb IBM 75GXP. I think it has a 2mb Cache... Is this why?. If it isn't what's the problem (and solution)?

 

[loosbrew]

formatting a drive takes up space for the file allocation table(?). im not exactly sure on the details but, i know that when you buy a 30, 20 or 15 gig drive...youre really getting 28, 18, 14 ish. its not limited to these drives, thats just an example. you never get what you pay for


loosbrew

 

[Priit]

It's just that HDD manufactures are calculating the size of the disk using powers of 10, but "computers" are calculating with powers of 2 (1Gb is 1 000 000 000 bytes for the HDD manufacturer but 1 073 741 824 bytes for the "computer&quot

 

[FusionTorch]

HD manufactures use 1,000,000,000 bytes, as a GB witch is not true. A Gigabyte is really 2 to the 30th power (1,073,741,824) bytes. One gigabyte is equal to 1,024 megabytes. A megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes.

 

[Edski]

Nevermind what is says for the GB's, look at the actual bytes that Windows says the hard drive is. It should say something like 30,000,000,000