Hard Drive Size?

[mitch529]

I have 2 40 gig hard drives and was just wondering if this is normal!

My master HD has a 37.30gig capacity and has 35.76gigs Free-95%

My slave HD has a 37.27gig capacity and has 36.45gigs free-97%

Is this normal to start out only with a 37.30 capacity even know it’s a 40 gig HD what takes up that space the formatting of the NTFS??

 

[Cosmin]

This problem was also discussed in past ( have you read that ? ) .
Some error correctors ( logical errors ) like NDD can resolv your problem ..

 

[mitch529]

If you are refering to the post Space Problem on HD yes I have read it.

I dont have that problem, So are you telling me that my hd should not have that much space taken up allready? I have reformatted my hd like 7 times and its always the same.

Am I doing something wrong or is that much taken up by default or something?

And whats NDD??

 

[Geffy]

XP automatically leaves 8MB of your disk space unformated to store partition information, the remaining section would prob be the area set aside but not quoted as part of the useable size for the MFT and some of the autorecover algorithms.

This is only a possible idea, I have no data to back this up, and not backup for my data

 

[JJB6486]

Actually you lose space because rather then showing exact drive size, manufactuers round of the sizes of drives down at the byte level or something like that. Its a mathematical sales scheme. That was effective back years ago when the rounding only caused the loss of a couple megabytes, however with larger drives, the same mathematical rounding in advertized size has caused the loss of gigabytes.

JJB6486

 

[Geffy]

yeah forgot about that, its like the 2MB floppy disks are only really 1.44, as some space is lost in formatting, But the Manufactures called the sizes 1000 bytes to a kb, not the true 1024.

 

[Cosmin]

Originally posted by mitch529
If you are refering to the post Space Problem on HD yes I have read it.

I dont have that problem, So are you telling me that my hd should not have that much space taken up allready? I have reformatted my hd like 7 times and its always the same.

Am I doing something wrong or is that much taken up by default or something?

And whats NDD??

NDD = Norton Disk Doctor ( what i recommend , u can use another ) - saved me from a simillar problem ( almost 400 mb )

 

[Taurus]

manufacturers measure harddrive sizes a certain way. a normal gigabyte has 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024^3). but they measure 1,000,000,000 as 1gb. so a 40gb harddrive will really only have 37.25 real gigabytes.

hope that makes sense.

 

[mitch529]

Thanks

Hey thx everyone for the great info. I fully understand now! thx again for everyones time.