Question about HD size vs. actual disk space, and cluster size

[The Dancing Peacock]

I have a WD 60 gb drive that I have been using for a few months so far. When I got it, I partitioned it into 3 drives, using percentages. 2 40% and 1 20%. I end up with 2 22.36 gb drives, and one 11.16 gig drives. This is only 55.89 gb. I'm missing out on a few gigs that I would like to be using. I know that with partitioning you don't always get the same size as the drive states. My 13gb reports 12.68, not a big loss. But almost 5 gigs is alot.

I formatted them using NTFS and win XP. I used the default cluster size. Is there a way to change it to maximize disk space, and minimize this loss?


Thanks.

 

[ledzepp98]

the difference between expected disk space and actual disk space is due to the different ways of "measuring" size. hard drive manufacturers use base10 becuase it gives nice round numbers... basically, to them 1 gigabyte is 1 billion bytes. this is technically not accurate since it should be measures in base2, which is how windows sees it. for example, 1 kilobyte is not 1000 bytes, but rather 1024 bytes. a general approximation wouls be to take what the manufacturer says the size is and multiply by .93 to get the size windows will report. for example, your 60gig drive as stated by the manufacturer is reported by windows as 55.89gigs...60x.93=55.8, my 40gig drive is reported by windows as 37.2gigs...40x.93=37.2, and there ya go...

as far as the cluster size, i'm not familiar with ntfs (i've been sticking with fat32) but i know that it does not effect the total useable space, only wasted space in the form of "slack". basically, lets say you have 16k clusters and a file that is only 4k... it will occupy that cluster where the extra 12k cannot be used for another file, therefore, leaving 12k of slack. if, for example, the cluster size was 4k the file would fit perfectly without wasting any space... and if it was a 5k file then it would take up two 4k clusters but only waste 3k in the second cluster, and there ya go...

(i think i got it right but wait for others to back me up or correct me...)

 

[Bozo Galora]

dazzit mon!

1,000,000,000 phoney (GB) divided by 1,073,741,824 Real = 0.931322574615478515625 ratio

(also FAT tables take up quite a bit of space - especially on big drives, but thats later on)


Edit: So, 60GB X 0.931322574615478515625 = 55.8793544769287109375 GB!