Abnormal space on my new HDD

[monstert]

Hi, today I bought and installed a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 320GB SATA-II 16MB Cache -ST3320613AS).
Its my very first SATA HDD (yeah i'm a late bloomer lol) and i'm having it as my F: drive, for games.

The probelm is that it only shows up as 298Gb in windows and not 320gb. However it shows up as 320Gb in my BIOS.
I gave the SATA 101 sticky a read and it does mention that some HDD manufacturers calculate space in a differently.
Is this the case with Seagate to???
I'. also running 2x 200Gb IDE's and they show up as 203gb in BIOS and 189 in windows.:-/

I have all the latest updates and SP3 for my windows XP 32bit.

[jayfella]

Its all to do with cluster sizes, etc.. Those sizes are normal, there is nothing wrong. Its like memory... Well not quite, but you will see the math problem with computers and why the readouts are different.



1MB = 1024k - so 8MB = 8192k - so if you did some math, 80MB = 81920k - or 81.92MB - but it is classed as 80MB.. Same for gigabytes, etc... 80GB is actually 81920MB.. and the math goes on....

[monstert]

So really Seagate were better off as advertising it as 300Gb and not 320Gb?
Or is the market they are trying to appeal to all supposed to know this off the bat?

I sure didnt lol

[curtis1552]

You also have to take into account reserved space for the filesystem. It usually takes up 5-10% of the total harddrive space.

[jason4207]

Its just due to the differences in the way programs read the data. Some say MS is the one to blame...not the HDD manufacturers.

HDD manufacturers: 320,000,000,000 bytes. They call this 320GB based on the decimal version of the number. Right click on the drive and click properties. You should see something close to this number.

1,024 bytes in a KB, 1,048,576 bytes in a MB, 1,073,741,824 bytes in a GB...this is binary, not decimal...see the difference?

320,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 = 298.023GB according to XP.

[hitokiri_808]

All hard drives read like that, so its normal. With the exception being some enterprise drives and the Raptors.

[MadMan007]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix