Hard drive size

[bravo14]

I wonder where the other hard drive space goes to... like example 640 gig hard it only comes out 600 gigs where is the other 40 gigs go to? I think that is false information from the box and what the computer says. I think its false advertising.

 

[mancow]

File allocation overhead

 

[puzzleriddle]

from along time ago 1024 meg = 1 gig, always been rounded to 1000 meg.. go from there. I have a 1TB.. but with W7 & the other stuff tat came on it it read 717 Gigs, all drives are like that even the smaller USB drives.

 

[CapStar362]

its the binary math conversion and the file allocation overhead loss

 

[datainmotion]

Is there a partition you are not seeing (ex. - factory recovery partition)?

 

[n5ims]

I wonder where the other hard drive space goes to... like example 640 gig hard it only comes out 600 gigs where is the other 40 gigs go to? I think that is false information from the box and what the computer says. I think its false advertising.

A 640 GB drive will give you 596.05 GB of disk space so your about 600 gigs is correct.

This (What’s the real capacity of your hard drive? - The Gadgetress : The Orange County Register) should help explain where your "missing" space has went to. The issue is something like somebody reporting a liquid in liters when you expected it to be reported in quarts (1 US quart = 0.94635295 liters). What you end up with may be a bit smaller than what you thought you would get.

Like others have indicated, hard drive makers report their drives in bytes and use the base 10 values for "meg", "gig", and "tera", not the base 2 values. To the drive makers, a 1 megabyte drive is 1,000,000 bytes, but many expect it to be 1,048,576 bytes (1024 kilobytes, where a kilobyte is 1024 bytes). Using more recent drive sizes, that 1 gig drive (1,000,000,000 bytes) wouldn't be the 1073741824 Bytes you might expect. The difference only gets larger as drive size increases.

You can't really say that the drive makers are cheating you (although you can certainly think so) since they're following the common practice in the industry. If you closely read the packaging on a hard drive (it's probably also burried in the manual for the drives) it clearly states (assuming you magnifying glass is powerful enough to read the print that small) (from Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 Hard Disk Drive):

"One GB is equal to one billion bytes and one TB equals 1,000GB (one trillion bytes) when referring to hard drive capacity. Accessible capacity
will vary from the stated capacity due to formatting and partitioning of the hard drive, the computer’s operating system, and other factors."