Join now - be part of our community!

harddrive memory not add up to what it says

stevie_901
Visitor

harddrive memory not add up to what it says

my harddrive when i bought it said it was a 80GB, theres 2 seperate hard drives on my computer,

VAIO (C:) & VAIO (D:)

C: = 37.2 GB
😧 = 29.3 GB

total=66.5 GB

why is this? im loosing out on 13.5 GB which may sound im fusssy, but i want what i paid for....

2 REPLIES 2
profile.country.GB.title
Whitewing
Explorer

my harddrive when i bought it said it was a 80GB, theres 2 seperate hard drives on my computer, 

VAIO (C:) & VAIO (D:)

C: = 37.2 GB
😧 = 29.3 GB

total=66.5 GB

why is this? im loosing out on 13.5 GB which may sound im fusssy, but i want what i paid for....



hi
when manufacturers advertise the hard drives they advertise them as unformatted. after the drive is formatted it looses some of it space because of the way it writes the tracks.
also you will find it is only one phisical hard disk in your computer but partitioned into two to create two drives. drive C and D. i think partitioning the drive also results in some loss of space but not 100% sure. hope that helps . . . john

profile.country.GB.title
rich912
Contributor

Hi stevie_901,

You do have what you paid for.

The disparity in capacity is partly explained by the way MS as opposed to the drive manufacturer express size. The manufacturer uses the SI definition (1 kB = 1,000 bytes) of the prefixes "mega" and "giga" . Whereas Windows reports capacity using the binary definition (1 kB = 1,024 bytes), hence:

80GB hard drive means 80,000,000,000 bytes
/ 1024 = 78,125,000 kilobytes
/ 1024 = 76294 megabytes
/ 1024 = 74.5 gigabytes

The remaining space is occupied by the hidden recovery partition.

Go n-éirí an bóthar leat