Why won't all of the space of my HDD be used?

[7beauties]

I bought myself a WD Green Caviar HDD that has 2 terabytes of space. But I understand that not all of this space will be used by an operating system even after formatting the entire drive. Why is this?

 

[BlueAcolyte]

An actual terabyte has 1024 gigabytes which have 1024 megabytes each, etc.

Your "2tb" drive has 1000 gigabytes which have 1000 megabytes, etc.

It's just marketing.

 

[mlah384]

Isnt part of the space used for scratch space?

 

[RebateMonger]

It'd help if you were more specific. What are the numbers you are seeing? Is the OS seeing 1800 GB? Or 127 GB? Or...?

 

[7beauties]

I've decided to purchase the full blown Windows 7 Home Premium when it hits the store shelves on the 22nd of this month. What I have currently is Vista Home Premium SP1 as an upgrade to my Windows XP Home Edition with SP3. When I had to re-install my OS from scratch because of a corruption, I had to start with my original Windows XP and it prompted me to create a partition, but XP decided on a maximum size of the partition. Then, after loading Vista as the upgrade, I find that my partitions are only 127GB each. This is frustrating. Also, many programs that I would like to purchase as downloads won't allow me to browse for the partition I'd like it to reside in. They want to load it into the C partition, so at 127GB I would run out of space quickly. So, I purchased the Western Digital Green Caviar HDD with 2 terabytes of space. I want just one, huge C partition. Is this possible with Windows 7?

 

[ilkhan]

(2*10^12)/(22*2^40) should adequately explain the difference (its about 90.95% of what you expect, aka ?1810GB)

oh hey, new post.
the 127GB partition thing is a remnant of [32bit?] addressing. You get 32 bits to describe each sector, and you run out of numbers at 127GB. Its a problem up until XP SP...1? 2? Anyway, not an issue for partitions created with vista or 7. When you get 7 repartition the drive and (provided your hardware of large address capable) you won't have any issues. (although you run into a similar situation with the master boot record after 2TB (requiring GPT to fix and requiring all sorts of fun trying to boot GPT if its your boot disk).

 

[Ben90]

Yea that decimal terabyte/gigabyte is soo annoying yay for ocz trying to break that with their new labeling... too bad no one else will do it and it just makes it harder to search for drives on newegg

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: BlueAcolyte
An actual terabyte has 1024 gigabytes which have 1024 megabytes each, etc.

No, an actual terabyte has 1000 gigabytes.

Tera = 1000

Tebi = 1024

It's just marketing.

Actually, its science and convention that predates the moronic redefining of long standardized prefixes by OS makers.

 

[Elixer]

Originally posted by: 7beauties
I've decided to purchase the full blown Windows 7 Home Premium when it hits the store shelves on the 22nd of this month. What I have currently is Vista Home Premium SP1 as an upgrade to my Windows XP Home Edition with SP3. When I had to re-install my OS from scratch because of a corruption, I had to start with my original Windows XP and it prompted me to create a partition, but XP decided on a maximum size of the partition. Then, after loading Vista as the upgrade, I find that my partitions are only 127GB each. This is frustrating. Also, many programs that I would like to purchase as downloads won't allow me to browse for the partition I'd like it to reside in. They want to load it into the C partition, so at 127GB I would run out of space quickly. So, I purchased the Western Digital Green Caviar HDD with 2 terabytes of space. I want just one, huge C partition. Is this possible with Windows 7?

You can have a huge partition in XP and vista and win7 ... It is up to you, unless you used software to do it that isn't that smart/friendly.