Maxtor 120GB --> only 115GB formatted? Normal??

[kwo]

Hello all!

I just bought a Maxtor 120GB HD, and after formatting/partitioning under WinXP, it is only recognized as a 115GB drive....What happened to the other 5GB????

Is this a normal loss, or what?

My system:
Soyo 7KV Dragon+ MB
Windows XP Pro

So, my system is pretty new, and the BIOS correctly recognizes the 120GB drive....

Any thoughts?

Ran

<<<OK OK OK Got my answer, no need to keep pointing out the "obvious" to me anymore! 8-P >>>

 

[Lizardman]

yeah this is normal

Its got to do with all the bits and bytes. Marketing mostly

 

[DannyBoy]

Yes that is normal.

I wont go into details because it will hurt my head, but windows reads sizes differently to dos.

Dan

 

[nick1985]

if i had a nickel for everytime ive seen a thread like this....id have a vagina full of nickels

 

[DaveSimmons]

It's explained in the AT drive FAQ (and many previous threads here).

Ads and spec sheets for drives: "1 GB is one billion bytes"

But Computer Science (and Windows) uses 2^20 (1024 x 1024) for a MB, 2^30 (1024)^3 for a GB.

 

[Pacinamac23]

1 megabyte in windows = 1024 kilobytes, not 1000

 

[kwo]

I'm sorry to repeat such an apparently oft asked question. I knew that *some* space was unattainable after formatting/partitioning etc.......

I was just *shocked* that it could be as much as 5 GIGAbytes.....let's see, so 5/120 is about 4.2% of the drive capacity, which just seemed kinda high to me.....


Ran

 

[onelin]

...since I'm bored, I'll add the exact reasoning
It's quite simple, on the box they note that 1GB = 1 billion bytes. Well, 1GB does *not* equal exactly 1 billion bytes, it's a little bit more...so when windows tells you 115GB, that's the actual capacity. My "80" GB is something like 76GB in actuality. It's a stupid marketing annoyance just like gasoline is always some price and 9/10ths of a cent...silly.

a kilobyte is 2^10, a megabyte is 2^20, a gigabyte is 2^30 and so forth.
2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes - noticeably more than 1,000,000,000 when dealing with large drives. When you divide your 120,000,000,000 bytes the box says it is by this number, you get slightly more than 111GB.

It looks like windows was being generous, because yes...different OSes and filesystems measure things different ways.

 

[DannyBoy]

Which means you lose space in Windows due to the obvious fact windows reads files larger then they actually are.

Try right clicking a filer and viewing the properties.

You should see two sizes.
Example:

Size: 17.4 MB (18,264,559 bytes)
Size on disk: 17.7mb 17.7 MB (18,563,072 bytes)

Dammit guys my head hurts now :|

 

[onelin]

heh, whoops... by the time I posted, five others had already explained it

kwo: the apparent "loss" of 5+ GB shouldn't be due to formatting, especially on NTFS (and there's no way I would try to format that as FAT32). It's just marketing, see above.

 

[RichieZ]

O ya well my 120GB Seagate Barricuda V only formats to 111GB (approx 120 billion bytes) . So yours is really > 120GB

 

[OddTSi]

Originally posted by: MrFiTTy
Which means you lose space in Windows due to the obvious fact windows reads files larger then they actually are.

Try right clicking a filer and viewing the properties.

You should see two sizes.
Example:

Size: 17.4 MB (18,264,559 bytes)
Size on disk: 17.7mb 17.7 MB (18,563,072 bytes)

Dammit guys my head hurts now :|

The "Size on disk" size has nothing to do with "windows reading files larger than they are". I have several files (including 700mb disk images) where "Size" and "Size on disk" is exactly the same (even when looking at the number of bytes). I never get that with FAT32 drives, only with NTFS drives, so I think it has to do with the efficiency of the file system.

 

[Sid59]

...

your hard drive is defective, RMA! lol

 

[henmaster]

The "size on disk" thing is because the drive is divided into clusters and if you use part of a cluster the rest can't be used for another file. So if you create a 1KB file, the size on disk will be 32KB or whatever the cluster size is.

 

[arcenite]

115gig is even more than you should be seeing. Should be aprx 111.7gb

Bill

 

[Shagga]

Originally posted by: kwo
Hello all!

I just bought a Maxtor 120GB HD, and after formatting/partitioning under WinXP, it is only recognized as a 115GB drive....What happened to the other 5GB????

Is this a normal loss, or what?

My system:
Soyo 7KV Dragon+ MB
Windows XP Pro

So, my system is pretty new, and the BIOS correctly recognizes the 120GB drive....

Any thoughts?

Ran

<<<OK OK OK Got my answer, no need to keep pointing out the "obvious" to me anymore! 8-P >>>

I have just the same thing formatted it using NTFS and mine reports 117GB if I recall correctly. Will check it tonight. :frown:

 

[CraigRT]

Originally posted by: nick1985
if i had a nickel for everytime ive seen a thread like this....id have a vagina full of nickels

I can semi-relate with this statement... haha

 

[Sid59]

Originally posted by: Shagga

Originally posted by: kwo
Hello all!

I just bought a Maxtor 120GB HD, and after formatting/partitioning under WinXP, it is only recognized as a 115GB drive....What happened to the other 5GB????

Is this a normal loss, or what?

My system:
Soyo 7KV Dragon+ MB
Windows XP Pro

So, my system is pretty new, and the BIOS correctly recognizes the 120GB drive....

Any thoughts?

Ran

<<<OK OK OK Got my answer, no need to keep pointing out the "obvious" to me anymore! 8-P >>>

I have just the same thing formatted it using NTFS and mine reports 117GB if I recall correctly. Will check it tonight. :frown:

i think bios reads mine as 117 but within windows it says 114. Maxtor 120.

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: onelin0
...since I'm bored, I'll add the exact reasoning
It's quite simple, on the box they note that 1GB = 1 billion bytes. Well, 1GB does *not* equal exactly 1 billion bytes, it's a little bit more...so when windows tells you 115GB, that's the actual capacity. My "80" GB is something like 76GB in actuality. It's a stupid marketing annoyance just like gasoline is always some price and 9/10ths of a cent...silly.

a kilobyte is 2^10, a megabyte is 2^20, a gigabyte is 2^30 and so forth.
2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes - noticeably more than 1,000,000,000 when dealing with large drives. When you divide your 120,000,000,000 bytes the box says it is by this number, you get slightly more than 111GB.

It looks like windows was being generous, because yes...different OSes and filesystems measure things different ways.

actually 1 GB does = 1 billion bytes. windows uses a different unit which it claims is a GB but is really a GiB.

 

[OddTSi]

Originally posted by: ElFenix
actually 1 GB does = 1 billion bytes. windows uses a different unit which it claims is a GB but is really a GiB.

Maybe I should tell all my Computer Science professors (who all have Ph.Ds in CS and who by the way dislike MS, and are all about SPARC/*NIX) that they're wrong and have been teaching their classes wrong for the past 10-15 some odd years (some of whom were around in the computer scene BEFORE MS and GUI OSes were even created). Maybe they can notify all the people that write Computer Science lecture texts and have them fix these mistakes they've been making for years.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: OddTSi

Originally posted by: MrFiTTy
Which means you lose space in Windows due to the obvious fact windows reads files larger then they actually are.

Try right clicking a filer and viewing the properties.

You should see two sizes.
Example:

Size: 17.4 MB (18,264,559 bytes)
Size on disk: 17.7mb 17.7 MB (18,563,072 bytes)

Dammit guys my head hurts now :|

The "Size on disk" size has nothing to do with "windows reading files larger than they are". I have several files (including 700mb disk images) where "Size" and "Size on disk" is exactly the same (even when looking at the number of bytes). I never get that with FAT32 drives, only with NTFS drives, so I think it has to do with the efficiency of the file system.

Standard cluster size when using NTFS is 4096 bytes.
So, a 1 KB file will in reality use up 4 KB.

A good example of where this can really waste some space is a box we recently cleaned up at work, had aprox 1.2 million files spread 800k/400k files in two directories.
The dir with 800.000 files in had a very small "Size" since the files had very little data in them, I think it used something like ~20 MB, but the "Size on disk" was well over a gig.

 

[Pariah]

Originally posted by: OddTSi

Originally posted by: ElFenix
actually 1 GB does = 1 billion bytes. windows uses a different unit which it claims is a GB but is really a GiB.

Maybe I should tell all my Computer Science professors (who all have Ph.Ds in CS and who by the way dislike MS, and are all about SPARC/*NIX) that they're wrong and have been teaching their classes wrong for the past 10-15 some odd years (some of whom were around in the computer scene BEFORE MS and GUI OSes were even created). Maybe they can notify all the people that write Computer Science lecture texts and have them fix these mistakes they've been making for years.

Either your professors aren't very bright, or you weren't listening closely enough because 1 MB does not always equal 1024KB. Whenever dealing with data trasmissions (networking, internet, system buses, memory throughput, etc), 1MB = 1000KB, officially. The current DVD writers also measure capacity 1GB = 1000MB.

Also, a number of people seem to think this descrepancy has something to do with MS when in fact it doesn't. Hard drive capacity is detected at the hardware level and then reported to the OS meaning the OS has nothing to do with the capacity. If you look in your system BIOS or bootup screens of PCI controllers, you will see that the capacities are reported as 1GB=1024MB which is a report independent of any software stored on the computer. Any OS running on the x86 platform (and probably others as well, though I can't confirm that) should report the same capacity.

 

[Sunner]

Since SPARC was brought up, I can tell you that it's the same on SPARC boxen as well.

 

[Shagga]

Originally posted by: Sid59

Originally posted by: Shagga

Originally posted by: kwo
Hello all!

I just bought a Maxtor 120GB HD, and after formatting/partitioning under WinXP, it is only recognized as a 115GB drive....What happened to the other 5GB????

Is this a normal loss, or what?

My system:
Soyo 7KV Dragon+ MB
Windows XP Pro

So, my system is pretty new, and the BIOS correctly recognizes the 120GB drive....

Any thoughts?

Ran

<<<OK OK OK Got my answer, no need to keep pointing out the "obvious" to me anymore! 8-P >>>

I have just the same thing formatted it using NTFS and mine reports 117GB if I recall correctly. Will check it tonight. :frown:

i think bios reads mine as 117 but within windows it says 114. Maxtor 120.

Yeah ur right.

 

[PCMarine]

Heh, I even made a quick C++ program which will do the conversion for you

Link (Sorry about the poor hosting)