232 instead of 250 gigs on hard drive?

[Maniacal]

I remember seeing this mentioned here before but I can't find it.

C drive says it has 197 gigs out of 233 left but it's supposed to be a 250 gig hd. How do I get the extra space and why is it like that?

 

[ew0054]

It's how they play with the numbers. Take a diskette for example. Total useable storage is 1,213,952 bytes, if you count them as 1... 2... 3... but it is only 1.158 binary megabytes (using powers of 2). So naturally they report the more favorable amount. It is marketing. It is always going to be off by a certain amount, typically around 10 per-cent. Obviously it becomes more noticeable as drive sizes increase. To answer your question, there is no way to access the extra space because it does not exist in the first place.

Check out: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/fdd/formatSummary-c.html

 

[steviejay]

Put simply, they round up.

My 120 gig HD has 114gig in truth. It's just the practise. It can get annoying as in all honesty, I can't think of a reason for rounding it up but in all the instances I've had thats been the case

 

[Grisu]

it's not really rounding, harddisk manufactureres use a different definition of Gigabyte (naturally one that's in their favour).

usually in computer science you use binary numbers, so a gigabyte usually considered to be 2^30 Byte (1.073.741.824 Byte). harddisk manufacturers use base of ten, however, so a Gigabyte for them is 10^9 (1.000.000.000 Byte)

 

[handyandy]

Put very very simply, hardrives makes call a gig 1000mb but to computer recorgnises 1024mb to the gig

 

[AxiomUk]

There's also drive overhead for some form of record too.

 

[Maniacal]

Ahhh, ok, thank you! No matter, 232 is still a lot!

(unless I download too many Oblivion mods and add my morrowind stuff to it)

 

[steviejay]

heh yeah, once you go over 150 or so, unless you're downloading or photo-editing you don't need to go much further. I've actually got a 120 (read 114) gig internal HD and a 250 (round about the same as you I think) external I use for backup

 

[Tenochtitlan]

My 74.4 GB harddrive has only 70.3 GB on it


And I have less than a megabyte of freespace left

 

[Maniacal]

My 74.4 GB harddrive has only 70.3 GB on it


And I have less than a megabyte of freespace left

I know how you feel, my mom's computer only has 13 gigs left, which reminds me, I had forgotten and she had forgotten to remind me that I need to take my stuff off her comp (mostly) and free up like, 30 or so gigs.

 

[Xanikk999]

I remember seeing this mentioned here before but I can't find it.

C drive says it has 197 gigs out of 233 left but it's supposed to be a 250 gig hd. How do I get the extra space and why is it like that?

Maybe your partition size is smaller then the maximum space on the drive? Thats just my guess.

To make it bigger if thats the case, you will have to reformat.

 

[Turner]

That's not exactly his problem. It's the way that the manufacturer's use numbers now. 1 gigabyte = 1 billion bytes, not the 1 billion 72 megs that the powers of 2 give.

While there is probably unpartioned space on the hard drive, I doubt it's going to be 17 gig worth. A few megs, probably. At least, that's been my experience with the machines at my work.