PCWorld 320gb Toshiba external hard drive (merged)

scope

madkid88 wrote:

is that the toshiba one

Yes, thats the one.

Del_Boy_Gupta

excuse me for possibly asking a thicko question but i bought one of these and understand it has been preformatted prior to dispatch, but I thought that as it was a 320gb drive that after formatting it would be 310-315 gb so i was slightly disappointed with the volume on the drive actually only being 298gb.

Is this what others have found and the norm?

Also i connected it to a USB 2.0 drive I think and it is extremely slow making me wonder whether the port was USB 1.

How can I tell what type of port it is?

deefadog

Hard drive capacity's are always a lot lower than stated, it's something to with calculating the size by 1024 bytes - 1k and 1000bytes for 1K, something like that anyway!

Still a good buy though.

For a cheaper solution for backing up, if your case has a free 5.25 bay at the front, get your self a removable rack (£8), in which you put a hard drive in, then back up to this and you can just pull it out when ever you like, or get 2 and swap them so you always have a backup away from the PC!

We have taking this route in work and it works brilliantly!

BritBrat

bargaindoctor wrote:

i work for the nhs, how do i get a discount?

http://www.nhsdiscounts.com/

madjohn

Del_Boy_Gupta wrote:

excuse me for possibly asking a thicko question but i bought one of these and understand it has been preformatted prior to dispatch, but I thought that as it was a 320gb drive that after formatting it would be 310-315 gb so i was slightly disappointed with the volume on the drive actually only being 298gb.

Is this what others have found and the norm?

Also i connected it to a USB 2.0 drive I think and it is extremely slow making me wonder whether the port was USB 1.

How can I tell what type of port it is?

This happened to me. And I think it's astonishing!!
I got a 320Gb External HDD from PC World last time this offer was on these pages and I expected at least 310Gb out of the machine.

I only get 300Gb. So 20Gb (give or take for the extra 24bytes from the 1024-1000 factor) seems a bit of a waste to me.

I even took the thing back and complained due to the excessive (I percieve) wastage. But the new drive was just the same.

So we have to swallow this disadvantage. Perhaps they should be forced to display the true capacity of the drive..?

As for USB drives, if you have Windows XP it will tell you onscreen if you are using a USB 1 or 2 port.
Just buy a USB PCI card for your system (if you have a spare PCI slot inside your PC). Problem sovled.

pin

As I understand it so much GB is taken away for the NTFS / FAT32 partition. I think its standard with most hard drives, that some of the memory will be taken away for the partions / system files.

funkydom

The drives really are the capacity that they claim to be - its just that some space needs to be used by the filesystem that you format it with (NTFS, FAT32, EXT3 etc) .
The filesystem has to store information about the directory layout and what file each cluster on the disk is associated with, amongst other things, and for this it needs space proportional to the total size of the disk.

Sarah7

They're doing nothing wrong advertising this as 320GB (decimal); but if they said 320GiB (binary) then you could rightly complain...

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte

Del_Boy_Gupta

I just wanted confirmation that the volume was the same for everyone. 22gbs for the formatting just seemed steep.

I have connceted it to a number of ports on my pc and i have xp and on connecting to a couple it said it would be faster if i cnnected it to a usb2 port (indicating that some prts were usb 1) On ohters as no message came up i presume that they are usb 2 ports. Am I right in thinking this?

I did think that it wasn't very quick as it took a good 10 minutes to transfer across 4.4gbs of information form my internal hard drive and i thought it should have been quicker.

Can anyone advise me wheter as the drive has a on off switch on it whether it is easy as turning it off when you dont want to use it or should you leave it permantly on?- am i doing sdamage to it if i keep turning it on and off or should you always us the remove hardware icon first before switching the drive off?

funkydom

I just did some calculations and found the overhead imposed by the filesystem is actually pretty negligible.

For FAT32, the FAT table has one entry of 32 bits per disk cluster. Say the drive is 320 GB, and the cluster size is 4096 bytes, that means the total FAT table size is 312,500,000 bytes, or 312.5MB. There are usually 2 FATS per disk, and some other data (boot sector, root table), so the total overhead would be <1GB.

So this isn't much to do with the size difference. The real culprit is the conversion from Gigabytes to Gibibytes:

1 Gibibyte = 1024*1024*1024 = 1073741824 bytes

320 Gigabytes / 1073741824 = 298 Gibibytes.

Your PC will report the size as Gibibytes. The Drive manufacturer reports it as Gigabytes (wonder why?!)