Problems with Seagate 250gb HDD

[niranjan162]

Hey guys,

I just got a new computer and just put it all together last night, no problems while installing windows2k, i made only one partition, when i was updating drivers and stuff i looked at my computer and checked how much space i used. For some reason my hard drive only registers 230 gb not the full 250. Can anyone tell my how to fix this?

also what partitions would you guys recommend?

thanx in advance

 

[suicidalpigeon]

partition magic. some of it would be the space the os reserves, but thats a big portion of it. no experiences with 2k.

 

[niranjan162]

so would i have to reformat it or can partition magic just fix it

 

[n0cmonkey]

?

 

[Trevante]

There's nothing wrong with your harddrive. All harddrives are like that. My 80GB is 74.5GB, my 200GB's are actually 179GB, my 250GB is 233GB, my 300GB is 279GB.

The reason for this is because Windows and most other OS's read a gigabyte as 1024 megabytes, which is 1073741824 bytes (if I did my math correctly). However, to make prodution easier, harddrive manufactures uses 1000 megabyes per gigabyte, which is 1,000,000,000 bytes. If you do the math, you're losing about 73 megabytes for every gigabyte they say you're getting.

250x1,000,000,000=250,000,000,000 bytes

250,000,000,000/1073741824=232.83064365386962890625GB

Which is pretty close to the 230GB you're getting.

 

[niranjan162]

well i could understand .4bg or even a 1gb, but its missing 20gb, thats too much to be a simple discrepancy.

 

[Varun]

you must have missed the post above you

250,000,000,000/1073741824=232.83064365386962890625GB

it's not a discrepancy, that's just how life is. HDD manufacturers want to sell you a hard drive and advertise it as the biggest they can, however they know that the OS reads the space in binary but they don't care. There aren't too many base10 OSes out there.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: niranjan162
well i could understand .4bg or even a 1gb, but its missing 20gb, thats too much to be a simple discrepancy.

Do the math and get back to us.

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

Its true.

80 gigs = 74 gigs, 40 is 38, 120 is 110 I think.