Western Digital 80GB IDE Hard Drive

[DragonSlayer81]

Has anybody got this drive? I installed it on my Win2k machine(Asus P3v4x Mobo) it only see's 74.5GB. Am I suppose to be missing so much? Also It's formatted to fat32. Thanks for any replys.

 

[Elledan]

It's normal. 10 GB drives, for example, are actually only 9.something GB big. Make an HD 8 times as big and you'll 'miss' a few GB.

My 30 GB HD reports 27.9 GB as its size, which is correct.

 

[Pabster]

Hard drives are rated by manufacturers' a bit differently than actual figures. 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes for their purposes, so an 80GB drive offers ~80,000,000,000 total space which doesn't equate to an actual 80GB. That number sounds right.

 

[eikelein]

DragonSlayer,
What Pabster wrote is reason nbr. 1; additionally disk manufacturers use the raw unformatted drive capacity on their packaging/advertising/specs. By formatting quite some of that is 'lost' to store track and sector headers, bad block replacements, directories and so on.
Your numbers are dead on.

 

[DragonSlayer81]

Thanks guys. You've all be very helpful. Just thought it was missing quite a bit.

 

[Paulson]

My 60 gig hard drive amounts out to be a 55.8 gig hard drive...

So it's pretty normal.

 

[NelsonMuntz]

Yup, as the drives get bigger, it will look like you are missing more and more. If you take 80,000,000,000 which is the number of bytes on your drive and divide by 1024 three times to convert to gigabytes, then you will get 74.5 Gb, so the number you said is correct.