How big should a 100 GB drive be?

[Guttboy]

Hi Everyone....

Sorry for all the questions tonight but have a few spare minutes to work on the laptop before a meeting tomorrow night.

I have a Dell Inspiron 1705 with Win XP pro running on it.

It has a 100GB hard drive...or at least that was what was purchased.

When I look at it though...it shows up as only 87.05 GB?

Is this right?

Regards,

:)

[Zero Cool]

yea thats fine, I got 200GB seagate and it only shows 186GB :) its totally normal

[DRDNA]

Thats about right for a 100GiG drive...XP will not let you have all of the drive and this is normal...Xp gives me 465GiG on a 500 gig drive.

[Guttboy]

Hmmmm....well if I divide yours in two...I should be showing in the 90's though....is there a method to this?

[d44ve]

wow... a lot of questions tonight. Cleaning house? :)

You can try to make another partition

[Guttboy]

Yeah....like I said have some free time...RARE for me nowadays...so figured Id soak up as much as I can!

[Verikon]

Two answers to this.

First, Windows views hard drive space in what's now known as a "gibibyte" which is around 1073741824 bytes (it's the binary version, 2^30), but the OS still calls it a gigabyte because a gibibyte was the old standard for a gigabyte. Hard drive manufacturers now rate in "true" gigabytes (10^9), which is 1000000000 bytes. So that's why Windows reports a 100GB drive as less, because it is measuring "gigabytes" different than the manufacturer. Western Digital settled a class action lawsuit over this last year, people claimed it was false advertising.


But this will only account for maybe 7% "lost" hard drive space, so you should be showing over 90GBs. The other problem is that Dells come stock with a hidden FAT utility partition on the hard drive, which I think is at least a few gigs if I remember correctly. If you run Disk Management in Computer Management under Administrative Tools, I think you can see the partition.

Hope that helps!

[DanTheBanjoman]

Hard drives have been stating "1GB = 1000000000 bytes" since forever. So It's not false advertising. Technically this is correct. Like Verikon says the official unit is Gib (and Kib, Mib, etc) Gib minis Giga binary whilst Giga means billion. There is a lot of confusion around this basically because hardly nobody knows the Binary units and few programs actually use them. Torrentclients often do :)

[keakar]

every drive has around 10% of its size that doesn't show up.

this is normal and the bigger the drive the closer to the full 10% is missing.

some hard drives out there try to "fix" this by adding a little extra so it makes some people feel better to have a nice round number lol. i've seen some 110gb hdd and 330gb ones.

i have a 300gb and it only shows 279gb, my old 40gb hdd showed 37gb.

[Verikon]

Hard drives have been stating "1GB = 1000000000 bytes" since forever. So It's not false advertising. Technically this is correct. Like Verikon says the official unit is Gib (and Kib, Mib, etc) Gib minis Giga binary whilst Giga means billion. There is a lot of confusion around this basically because hardly nobody knows the Binary units and few programs actually use them. Torrentclients often do :)

Haha, yeah they've been stating it, but since when has that kept stupid people from suing?

[DanTheBanjoman]

Haha, yeah they've been stating it, but since when has that kept stupid people from suing?

Never seen any cases about it here. You must be talking about Americans when you say "stupid people", they're the ones that sue anyone for anything :)

[Verikon]

Never seen any cases about it here. You must be talking about Americans when you say "stupid people", they're the ones that sue anyone for anything :)

I do indeed mean Americans.

Here's the news post about the suit from 2006. (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060630-7174.html)

[Darth_Pewee]

as an american, i reckon i find that kinda mean.. i do believe im going to file a lawsuit against yous guys :laugh:;)

[Verikon]

As an American, I feel entitled to counter sue for pain and suffering, caused by your pain and suffering suit! SEE YOU IN COURT DARTH!

[Steevo]

Never seen any cases about it here. You must be talking about Americans when you say "stupid people", they're the ones that sue anyone for anything :)

I will sue you for saying that.:eek: