why 1tb hard drive has 878mb space only?

which file system to choose ?

hard drive company cheating ?

Hello pleasehelpme

Most manufacturers specify the size of their hard disks in bytes. If you know about computers, you know that to specify that in kilobytes you should divide by 1024 and then to get megabytes divide by 1024 again and so on.

However, that makes a disk look smaller than if you divide by a nice round figure like 1000 - makes the maths easier as well - you look as if you are producing bigger hard disks. The advertising men like that! Guess which way they usually get specified.

Also, when you format a disk and write partition tables to it some of the disk gets used so you are always left with less than you thought you should have whichever way you do the mathematics.

As to file system, if you are talking about Linux most of the distributions have a default and there is little reason to change that without very good reason. Most of the popular ones seem to use Ext3.

I've just looked at the third line of your post again and the answer has to be "Yes", but that is the way with so many specifications.

I would add if you are going to go with ext3 make sure to change the reserved for drive full size when creating the file system otherwise you will end up losing another 5% of the drive I believe that the lowest you can go is 1% could be wrong on lowest part as it has been years since I last used it you may be able to use .?% I would check the man page to be sure. Personally I have used reiserfs for many years and have only had one problem with it (had to rebuild the file system tree with no data loss doing it) with it you only lose 32mb for the journal when formatting which is less than ext3 for that part as well I believe.