Mis-labelled goods? Or am I confused?

MamaMoo_2

I purchased a laptop for £299.99 from Comet last Friday.
It was advertised as having a 500gb HDD. There is even a sticker on the unit advertising it as such.
However, today I noticed that, according to the properties on the laptop, it's a 450gb hard drive, and only around 415gb is usable (after the OS etc)
I think that having 10% of my HD missing is poo!
I can kind of understand 35gb used up by the OS and pre-installed software (although this does seem extremely high memory usage) but the absent 50gb is irking me.
Does anyone have any ideas?

CoolHotCold

Ahh.

Depending on the make of laptop you'll find that from that "500GB" they advertise some will be hidden by the recovery partition (if you ever need to restore the system back to factory settings) so thats between 10 to 20GB missing straight away, and also every manufacturer deems "500GB" as 1000MB. (essentially multiples of 1000 instead of 1024, so if you start at 1 Byte, times that by 1000 to get a KiloByte, times that 1 KB by another 1000 to get a MegaByte, then times that 1MB by 1000 again to get 1GB thats how most manufacturers classify a GB, instead true GB (and how Windows expects to see a GB is actually 1024 multiples instead of 1000.)

And they you have a slight overhead for filesystem accounting etc.


Little bit Technical, but no ones duping you, it's just how it's advertised and works.

baza52

go to control panel-system-device manger-disk drives and click properties then the volumes tab followed by clicking the populate button (assuming win7)

This will tell you the total size of the disk including any partitions.

Al_Ross

This is 100% normal with hard drives ,they never show as the full amount stated.

I have a 320gb hard drive this shows as 285gb in my properties

Fosterdog

It's completely normal for the drive to be like this

bod1467

As above. For example an old 120GB drive of mine showed as 111GB in Windows. Using the same ratio (111/120 = 0.925) means your 450GB drive will show as approx 416GB.

paddyrg

OP you are right, but it is a stupid situation caused by marketing and techie people not agreeing on the terms.

The most important number in the binary/digital age is 2 (off or on). Everything relates back to 2. 1kilobyte is actually not 1000 bytes but 1024 bytes (2^10), so you see a 2.4% variance already! This compounds to about 7.5% difference at Gigabyte level, so that is where 7.5% has gone! Add your preinstalled files, your recovery partition (so they don't have to make you DVD's of the software), and the fact that storage uses blocks of data, so even the tiniest file uses a block (think of shipping containers, some are full, some contain only a few items) and your HDD is fully accounted for!

So yes, you are right, but it's not the whole story!!

kittykarate

It was a swizz when disk manufacturers were allowed to specify their space so that a gigabyte was 1000000000 bytes rather than the 'correct' computing value of 1073741824bytes (2 to the power of 30).

The problem is, all OS use the computing definition of gigabytes, so your disk appears smaller under windows. Also you'll lose a small amount of space to the structures that actually make up the filesystem (inode tables etc)