Getting full use of a Drive

[Pc_Madness]

I'm running WinXp Pro... is there anyway to get the harddrive capictity to what it should be? I have a 20gb drive which shows as 18.blah gb

[Nightwalker83]

Through the Bios?

[Pc_Madness]

Originally posted by Nightwalker83
Through the Bios?

Don't ask me?? I'm asking the question. :D

[si_the_geek]

Originally posted by Pc_Madness
I'm running WinXp Pro... is there anyway to get the harddrive capictity to what it should be? I have a 20gb drive which shows as 18.blah gb

You've been conned by the industry... 20GB in standard terms is 20 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 = 21474836480 bytes.

20 GB in Hard-drive manufacturers terms is 20 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = 20000000000, which in usual terms is 18.626 GB

:rolleyes: evil industry!

[Pc_Madness]

Originally posted by si_the_geek
You've been conned by the industry... 20GB in standard terms is 20 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 = 21474836480 bytes.

20 GB in Hard-drive manufacturers terms is 20 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = 20000000000, which in usual terms is 18.626 GB

:rolleyes: evil industry!

AAhh...


Well.... we have an old 10gb drive... and a friend of the family took it away so that we got the missing gb's back, had to use some kinda of special software...

I do believe that was 8/10gb available on that one...

[JoeyCode]

Formatting the drive with whatever file system you're using also takes up some space that's devoted to that system. Plus you've got cluster sizes, the minimum block size that files fit into, which depends on the file system and size of the drive partition. All this is why you only get 1.44MB on a 2MB floppy disk and why you'll never be able to use the full hard drive space your drive comes with.

[JoshT]

Right - if you have 32K cluster sizes and make an 8K file, the file system still uses 32K to store the file.