Full Capacity of New Hard Drive Isn't Recognized. Why Not?

km4hr · 03-12-2009, 04:11 PM

My laptop came with a 60GB drive. It pooped out so I bought a new drive. The smallest drive available at Best Buy was 160GB. When installed it in my PC it only registers about 140GB. I'm happy with that much GB. But my question is, where are the missing GB? Will this situation cause problems in the future? Or is it ok to use it this way?

Lee_Ball · 03-12-2009, 04:15 PM

What is registering 140GB? Your OS, your BIOS?

lazlow · 03-12-2009, 04:30 PM

Probably two things going on. First they sell HD by 1000MB/GB instead of 1024, so you loose some there. Assuming you are running EXT3 (standard for most installs) it reserves 5% for system use(root only) and you have the overhead for the journal.

jay73 · 03-12-2009, 06:29 PM

Yeah, that's it. Drives are always 7% smaller than you think. And then you lose more space when you format although the exact amount can be manipulated (tune2fs -m command).

Lee_Ball · 03-13-2009, 04:01 AM

The bits to bytes conversion didn't used to make much difference, but now drives are getting much larger, you actually appear to "lose" quite a bit.

onebuck · 03-13-2009, 09:13 AM

Hi,

There are no loses. The hdd space is 1024 not 1000 X the specified space (i.e; 60,80, 100 etc.) to calculate the space. Also remember that space will be allocated too root along with journaled space support if your filesystem happens to be a journaled FS.

Loads of people fall into this trap.