467 GB from a brand new 500 gb?

[sean126]

any particular reason that I only get 467 gigs from a 500 gig when I format? I used the windows xp disk management thing in the control panel.

Is this normal for such a big loss? I didn't know how else to format the darn thing. I just wanted one big drive.

did you ever have one of those days?? and I get the added bonus of a wife telling me to get off the computer while I'm trying to straighten this out.

[Reloadron]

Originally Posted by sean126

any particular reason that I only get 467 gigs from a 500 gig when I format? I used the windows xp disk management thing in the control panel.

Is this normal for such a big loss? I didn't know how else to format the darn thing. I just wanted one big drive.

did you ever have one of those days?? and I get the added bonus of a wife telling me to get off the computer while I'm trying to straighten this out.

1. Relenquish the computer to your wife!

2. What you are seeing is normal. This gets into a few things but again is normal. The issue is based on binary and decimal counting. Working from a Kilo byte being 1,000 bytes or 1,024 bytes as seen in binary. Short of it is your HDD is based on Base 10 while the OS sees it as binary.

As of 2007, most consumer hard drives are defined by their gigabyte-range capacities. The true capacity is usually some number above or below the class designation. Although most manufacturers of hard disks and Flash disks define 1 gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes, the computer operating systems used by most users usually calculate a gigabyte by dividing the bytes (whether it is disk capacity, file size, or system RAM) by 1,073,741,824. This distinction is a cause of confusion, as a hard disk with a manufacturer rated capacity of 400 gigabytes may have its capacity reported by the operating system as only 372 GB, depending on the type of report.
The difference between units based on SI and binary prefixes increases exponentially — in other words, an SI kilobyte is nearly 98% as much as a kibibyte, but a megabyte is under 96% as much as a mebibyte, and a gigabyte is just over 93% as much as a gibibyte. This means that a 500 GB hard disk drive would appear as "465 GB". As storage sizes get larger and higher units are used, this difference will become more pronounced.

Gigabyte - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Therefore be happy as you have 2 GB more than expected. Now give up the computer to your wife!

Ron

[garetjax]

Originally Posted by sean126

Is this normal for such a big loss?

It's quite normal, and I can feel your pain. It's frustrating to shell out the money for a hard drive to cover your storage needs only to find out you're short a few, (okay, a lot) of gigabytes. For example, I just purchased a new Western Digital Scorpio 320GB 5,400 RPM laptop hard drive. After installing it, I get a whole 298GB of storage space left. So yeah, it's quite substantial, but nothing you can really do about it unforuntately.

[sean126]

Thanks fellas!!

reloadron....you made me laugh. My wife now has the computer.

[oldman_gamer]

Mine reads as 465 GB too....no biggy.I will never fill it up anyway.

[theburan]

Mine is also 465... but the only reason it's not full is the 320 gig hard drive that I keep all my games installed on and my updates backed up n stuff.

[Hitman]

A few years ago one of the major HD manufactures got sued over this issue. I think it was Western Digital. They were accusing them of false advertising.

Here is the story Attention hard drive manufacturers! Most people believe that a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes! | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com