Missing Gigabytes on a new harddrive

SiMaster

Hi

I have just bought a new harddrive for my laptop,

Tech Specs:

Western Digital
WD2500BEVS
2.5-inch SATA Hard Drive
250 GB
1.5 Gb/s
8 MB Cache
5400 RPM

It is a 250GB drive - I have partitioned it into one primary drive (i.e. one big drive) and formatted it with NTFS.

But only 238 GB Show up - where are the remaining 12GB?

Can anyone help?

Thanks

SiMaster.

Donnie

HDD manufacturers rate 1GB as 1000MB. Windows recognises 1GB as 1024MB. I think that's right.

SemperFi

It's all to do with a there being 1024 bytes in a megabyte. And 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte Not 1000 as commonly thought. It's a sales technique of sorts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

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


"The usage of the word "gigabyte" is ambiguous, depending on the context. When referring to RAM sizes and file sizes, it traditionally has a binary definition, of 1024³ bytes. For every other use, it means exactly 1000³ bytes. In order to address this confusion, currently all relevant standards bodies promote the use of the term "gibibyte" for the binary definition."

heatherw_01

You never get the full gb, some will always be missing.

MercilessKiller

spot on Donnie.

That hard drive is absolutely fine

superscaper

You're not missing anything. You bought a hard drive advertised with 250 Gigabytes. The windows operating system tells you how much space you've got in Gibibytes but it calls it Gigabytes. 250 Gigabytes (GB) equals 238 Gibibytes (GiB)

SiMaster

Cool guys.. i had thought it was along those lines. My main concern was that in Disk manager it registers as 238GB but in Partition magic (the programme i used to partition it) it registers as 250GB.

superscaper

SiMaster wrote: »

Cool guys.. i had thought it was along those lines. My main concern was that in Disk manager it registers as 238GB but in Partition magic (the programme i used to partition it) it registers as 250GB.

Again they're using two different "common" definitions of the term. And strictly speaking they're both wrong as you should NOT be using the SI prefixes for decimal numbers in conjunction with binary numbers. Hence the introduction of IEC/IEEE binary prefixes (see my sig) which are unambiguous.

MercilessKiller

Do you mean gigabytes and gigabits superscraper? :x

superscaper

MercilessKiller wrote: »

Do you mean gigabytes and gigabits superscraper? :x

:eek:
Bytes of course (that's why I definitely put capital "B"s in my units, GiB, GB)

Although it'd be good for marketing, a 4 Terabit drive sounds better than a 250 Gigabyte one.