🚀 go-pugleaf

>>> The marketing people at maxtor (and other drives), use the mathematical
>>> definition to describe their drive capacities. So your 160GB drive holds
>>> 160,000,000,000 Bytes (mathematically accurate). Windows reports drive
>>> sizes using the other definition, so to windows your drive holds 160 /
>>> 2^30 = 149GB.
>>>
>>> Strange but true - the only industry or dicipline in the world where 
>>> 160GB
>>> = 149GB! But this is probably where you are 'losing' over 10GB of space.
>>> The answer is that you aren't losing the space, its just windows 
>>> reporting
>>> the size wrongly.
>>>
>>I would say Windows is reporting it correctly, the Manufacturers have
>>changed the way of SELLING hard drive space.
>>
> Both are inaccurate.
> The drive-makers tend to over-list a drive

Not really, we are talking about a 160GB drive here, which has 160 Giga 
Bytes (160,000,000,000) of space. Pretty simple!

> This practice stopped (and was already dying) when they went to SCSI and
> ATA drives with internal formatting, where the user *couldn't* write a
> whole track as a single block.
>
> However drive-makers even then tended to call all of the extra (but
> hidden) sectors on a drive that are used to reallocate defects as part
> of their advertised "size".
>
> They *still*, even now, tend to use decimal byte-counts (which look
> bigger) than megabyte-counts (1024 bytes = 1Kb, 1,048,576 bytes = 1Mb,
> 1,073,741,824 bytes = 1Gb) to count how big a drive they're selling.
>
> Those (of course) are RAW bytes available to the OS to use (supposedly).
> To actually *use* a drive however, doesn't leave *nearly* that many for
> the user.
> 1.  Every drive has to have a "boot sector" set aside and written
> (actually, far more than just a single sector, these days) it must also
> be "partitioned" a "formatted.

Only if it is a system drive. A second hard drive in a system doesn't need a 
boot partition.

> 2.  When partitioned, some of the space is lost defining the partition.
> Also, far more space is lost in various formats that don't allow
> partitioning the full space available; so there's some unpartitioned
> space left over in almost every drive these days.  The bigger the drive,
> the more likely.  In my 160-gig drive (for example), even when I tell
> Windows to partition the entire drive as one huge volume, 8 gig is left
> over.  ;-{

Why did you leave 8GB behind? Following installation of my new system drive, 
I partitioned my Samsung Spinpoint 160GB 2 days ago, using windows and I am 
using the full 160GB, there's is no 8GB space left! That's 160 Giga Bytes as 
in 10^9. No approximations, no rounding, a pure 160GB. If you want me to 
approximate it using some bizarre inaccurate power of 2, then its 149.05GB, 
but we are still talking about 160,000,000,000 in 1 partition.

> It seems a bit of a waste to not use 8 gigabytes;

So don't waste it then!

> 3.  Finally, in "formatting" a drive, space is needed on the drive for
> the operating system to tell where things are stored.  Spaces for
> directories, "FAT tables" or the equivalent, and other information.
> Even if (like in some OS schemes) they just start with a basic simple
> directory-structure that can be expanded; with directories just being
> another type of file, and locations stored similarly, when you end up
> with much of the disk space used, the directory structure still takes up
> considerable space that cannot be used by other files.

That is like saying part of an encyclopedia is lost space because there are 
50 pages of index!

> Windows doesn't count all those as space on the disk when it reports a
> drive's "size".

Yes it does. Program Files, Administrative tools, Computer management, Disk 
Management, overhead column.

> So:  Who is wrong?

Everybody thinks they are right (including me!)

> You just have to keep it in mind when buying a drive that a certain
> percentage of the drive's "sale size" won't be left as "user size".

Well actually, as mentioned, I have my Samsung Spinpoint 160GB drive as a 
'files' disk. It has a raw capacity of 160,000,000,000 Bytes. There is no 
boot partition. There is some space *used* as the index (FAT), but this is 
space on the drive that exists and is being used, so is not 'lost'. The size 
of the parition is reported using a binary approximation as 149.05 gB, where 
g = 1073741824 (Gibi (g), not Giga (G)). So as a mathematical quantity, or 
actual number, there are 160,041,218,867 Bytes in the partition, marginally 
more that the actual capacity due to rounding errors in the calculation! So 
wasted/lost space = 0.0000000%.

Sorry folks (and nothing personal Frank), but this subject really gets me 
going - its such basic mathematics, it really annoys me when people choose 
to use very new, alternative and wrong definitions for clearly defined terms 
that have been around for a very long time.