Question about portable hard drive

[matt]

Hi guys.

Just a quick question.

I went out and bought a Seagate (FreeAgent Go) 160GB portable hard drive yesterday.

Got it home, plugged it into the lappy.

Everything's going good, except when I take a look at the drive in My Computer, right click and click on Properties, it's showing the capacity as 149GB.

This is meant to be a 160GB external hard drive.

So where has the remaining 11GB gone and how can I access the full storage capacity????

Many thanks.

[vindictive666 (John)]

i have the same thing on my new 500gig internal i bought recently

it has about 30 odd mb of data in a partition i need special software for to access so i think ill pass on that one

as for your 11 gig possibly the same

besides i am pretty sure you never get a full 160 gig ect ect because of the sectors ect ect (1024 bytes to meg 1024mb to gig and so on)

11 gig howevers seems to be a bit much ?

maybe someone else will comment further

regards john

[Zuts]

Hi,

Manufacturers quote storage capacity in decimal gigabytes,

1,000 mb = 1gb.

Windows reports capacity correctly as 1 gb = 1024 * 1024 kb.

Your 149 gb is close to the correct amount

149 * 1024 *1024 = 156,000,000 bytes. It's not quite 160,000,000 available because a percentage of the disk capacity is lost when formatting the track info.

You havnt been ripped off, This is just the way manufacturers report it and they have been doing it for years. When discs were small the difference was not noticeable, now that they are very big it just happens to be more noticeable.

Cheers
Paul

[matt]

Thanks for the replies/explanations, guys

Originally Posted by Zuts

You havnt been ripped off, This is just the way manufacturers report it and they have been doing it for years.

Hi Paul.

I wasn't suggesting I'd been ripped off or anything like that. I was just wondering why the drive was showing such a large discrepency in terms of what I thought I should see.

I was also more interested in how I might claim back 'lost' disc space if, in fact, that was possible. But you've kindly explained that that's not possible, since I'm pretty much getting the full 160GB.

I must say it's confusing though to read 160GB on the packaging and then see 149GB capacity when you plug it in.

Again, many thanks.

[dannat (Daniel)]

11 gb is a lot to lose, usually its a few. You could re-format it & see how ht goes - has th manufacturer bundled heaps of software like recovery backup stuff that is chewing the space? try showing all hidden files

[matt]

Here's a screen capture of the drive's Properties.

As you can see, it shows a capacity of 149GB, while also confirming it offers 159, 966, 408, 704 bytes.

Confusing, huh?