WD 80 gig

[raven]

Hey guys.. i just picked my self up a WD 80 gig 8 meg cache.. and when i put it in my pc.. it only reads 76 or so gigs... is this normal or what? i dont have too much experience with Hard Drives so any information would be gladly accepted!

raven

 

[lightbulb8817]

That's normal. Maxtor, seagate, and I think IBM does the same.

 

[raven]

hey thanks, but any reasons why they do this?

 

[lightbulb8817]

They are trying to save every penny they can

or...there might be a limit to how much data each disk in the hd can hold.

 

[raven]

well if they have 40 gig platters... shouldnt they be 80 gigs?

 

[lightbulb8817]

I'm not really a hd expert, but I think that there are several disks in a hd. And each disk can only hold so much data...so 80gb hd may take four 20gb disks, but each of the disks don't equal 20, probably like 19gb.
Same thing with 40gb hd's, they don't equal exactly 40gb.

 

[gas-man]

I always thought it was related to formatting. Without format (which you can't use) it's 40 gigs, but after formatting and installing an O/S or whatever, a 40 would be around 37.8gb or so...

 

[Glorious100]

You have to count it like this:

A disk of 80GB = 80.000.000 kilobytes

80.000.000 / 1024 = 78125 megabyte

78125 / 1024 ~ 76GB