SSD capacity question 16 May 2019 at 12:11PM edited 30 November -1 at 1:00AM in Techie Stuff 19 replies 1K views

tonygold

just fitted a Crucial 480GB MX500 SSD to my laptop. makes the whole experience so much better - faster response to opening programs etc.

one question: in 'my computer' when right clicking on the SSD the capacity is shown as only 430GB. is that right? or is that the capacity not including the operating system that i cloned over (windows 10 home 64 bit)?

many thanks.

Johnmcl7

The hard drive and solid state manufacturers usually measure the capacity in a different way to the operating system, the manufacturers calculate a gigabyte as 1000000000 bytes whereas the operating system calculates one GB as 1073741824 bytes. This means a hard drive or solid state drive will usually show a lower capacity within the operating system.

tonygold

Johnmcl7 wrote: »

The hard drive and solid state manufacturers usually measure the capacity in a different way to the operating system, the manufacturers calculate a gigabyte as 1000000000 bytes whereas the operating system calculates one GB as 1073741824 bytes. This means a hard drive or solid state drive will usually show a lower capacity within the operating system.

thanks john but this is just over 10% lower than stated capacity. just checking if that is about right?

debitcardmayhem

What does disk management say ? (right click on the windows icon on the task bar)

stragglebod

If you cloned the old disk it probably also cloned over the hidden partition that stores the factory restore image. So that'll reduce the space available on your C drive.

DoaM

My Samsung 500GB SSD shows in Windows as ~465GB ... ~7% reduction. (Clean install, not a clone of an existing disk).

tonygold

thanks for replies. i'm glad now i didn't go for the 256GB option as i would have had very little space left. as it is i am still showing 150GB of free space so that will last me. i keep my music on an external drive and could do the same with my pictures also i suppose.

almillar

As well as the 8 byte problem, Windows likely has a small system partition hidden from you. If you follow debitcardmayhem's advice, you should see your disk with the big 430GB partition, and a small (500MB?) partition.

tonygold

almillar wrote: »

As well as the 8 byte problem, Windows likely has a small system partition hidden from you. If you follow debitcardmayhem's advice, you should see your disk with the big 430GB partition, and a small (500MB?) partition.

thank you.
in disk management the following are listed:
260MB EFI System partition
430.79GB NTFS C:
958MB Primary Partition
33.66GB Recovery Primary Partition

all are showing as 'healthy'.

many thanks for the assistance.

Neil_Jones

DoaM wrote: »

My Samsung 500GB SSD shows in Windows as ~465GB ... ~7% reduction. (Clean install, not a clone of an existing disk).

It's not a 7% reduction at all. The issue with hard drive capacities that are smaller than the label comes about because they are manufactured as an unformatted capacity and are due to rounding.

Potted history lesson - 8 bits in a byte, 1024 byes is 1 kilobyte. 1024 Kiloboytes = 1 megabyte, 1024 megabytes is 1 Gigabyte.

So: 500GB = 500,000,000,000 (bytes) / (1024*1024*1024) = 465.66 GB.

For a 480Gb the same calculation comes out as 447.03Gb, so presumably the OP has cloned an existing partition. Sometimes what happens is in a straight clone if the original partition was smaller it can get enlarged, which I think is what's happened as that system partition in Windows 10 is typically only 100Mb IIRC so they all get upsized.

grumpycrab

tonygold wrote: »

in disk management the following are listed:
260MB EFI System partition
430.79GB NTFS C:
958MB Primary Partition
33.66GB Recovery Primary Partition

A clean install would have done ...a clean install and not "wasted" space with a 34GB recovery partition. There's no need for a recovery partition these days - Windows10 (I assume this is what you have!) is so easy to (re) install. Obviously, you would have had to backup documents and any installed program keys first.