Help me find my missing 10gig! lol

[Little-Miss]

Don't laugh!

 

I bought a 160 gig HDD...

 

I decided i was going to partition it, so i made a 40gig partition and slapped W2K3 on there. Went into Windows, into disk management and bought the other partition to life.

 

So i've been happily putting my media and stuff on there but have just noticed that the second partition is only 110gig (109 actually). Now, i am absolutely positive that it all added up....

 

Even disk management sees it as 150! (149.05 to be precise)

 

Can someone please explain what happened to my missing 10...

 

Thinking about it, i could check the bios, see if that sees its full size...

[PeterW]

That is the NTFS formatted capacity, its always less than the raw disk capacity. The larger the drive the more noticable it is for example a 1.5TB drive has a NTFS formatted capacity of 1398GB.

[Little-Miss]

 

I knew you could lose some space through things like that, but not 10 gig!! Shocker...

[dyoung5]

Actually, NTFS formatting is only part of it, the main problem is drive manufactures quoting GBs as 1000 MBs. The confusion then comes when the OS/Disk utilities report GBs as 1024 MBs (the correct ammount).

 

This means that your "160GB" disk would only be about 155GB, add on the partition tables and NTFS formatting, that would bring you down to your 150GB.

 

This is a very irritating problem, and I wish that drive manufacturers used real GB, but I know they wont change.

[SYNACK]

Edit: It looks like dyoung5 beat me to it, the citation may still be usefull anyhow

 

It’s not just that, there is a basic discrepancy in how hard drive manufacturers label their drives. The manufacturers use metric and OS’s use binary so 1MB is 10^6 (1,000,000) as used by the drive manufacturers instead of 2^20 (1,048,576) in the binary form that is used by operating systems. This is the cause of the discrepancy

 

Hard disk drive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edited January 4, 2009 by SYNACK

[DMcCoy]

 

I knew you could lose some space through things like that, but not 10 gig!! Shocker...

 

Don't forget disk manufacturers use 1,000,000 bytes = 1MB

 

160GB HDD = 160000000000, but when using 1048576 bytes to a MB you get 149.01GB

[powdarrmonkey]

In strict notation, 10^6 is equal to 1 MB (mega-byte), but 2^20 is 1 MiB (mebi-byte) for exactly this reason as of 1998.

 

However, I only ever get blank looks when using the latter, because in practice everybody knows them both as a MB. Still, it salves my own conscience

 

[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiB[/ame]

Edited January 4, 2009 by powdarrmonkey

[StewartKnight]

Try the hd on a xbox, the 20gb hd has over 5gb of micro$oft anti copy protection on it. Over a quarter of an already small hd taken up by essentially DRM that is larger than Windows XP!!!!