maximizing HD space

[MrPG]

Hey Ladies, Gents- I just bought a ext. WD 750GB drive and when I first installed the drive it was formatted at about 730GB. Since then I've repartitioned & reformatted once but now its showing up as 698GB. No matter what, windows sees it unformatted as a "basic" drive with capacity of "715,402 MB" then when I format I get 698GB usable. There anyway I can re-initialize this thing to factory defaults or get back to 730GB usable?

I guessing the drive when first installed was detected at its full capacity, 750,156 MB, as reported by wd.com but somehow repartitioning under windows changed something and the drive is showing 715,402 MB

 

[Auric]

Around 93% useable of stated capacity is normal, particularly with 64KB NTFS. Perhaps the original format had smaller clusters. Is it normal for such externals to be pre-formatted? In any case, I recommend the first thing to do with any new drive is run the manufacturer's full diagnostics. Only then bother with formatting.

 

[CDC Mail Guy]

Originally posted by: MrPG
Hey Ladies, Gents...

LADIES??? There's no ladies here.


LOL just kidding

 

[esquared]

A 750 GB drive registers 698.49GB.

750GB is 750,000,000,000 bytes.

A true gigabyte is 1024^3 or 1,073,741,824 bytes.

750GB / 1.073 = 698.49GB 1.073 = (1.024)^3

Google search for 750 reads as 698

Another way of explaining it here

Why is it that when I connect my 750gb hard drive, it actually has only 698?
Western Digital is using GiB and Windows is showing you GB
750 GiB * (1000^3) / (1024^3) = 698 GB
Windows is saying 1024 bytes make a kilobyte (KB)
WD is saying 1000 bytes make a kiolbyte (KiB)

edit:
I did find this strange piece in t his link. Someone says that they heard WD measures their drives differently than Seagate. It wasn't comfirmed but here's the link. 750 GB WD