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    200gig harddrive showing as 186gig

    hi, have a 200gb hd here. formatted in xp and now its only 186gb. where the other 14gig?? an old installation of xp was on there b4 the format.

    any ideas guys?

    #2
    It is because a actual gigabyte in computer talk is
    1,073,741,824 bytes

    but marketing brain people think that it is easier to think that
    1,000,000,000 bytes is a Gigabyte.
    So you are getting the same amount of bytes for your money, it is just a few of them are lost in translation so to speak.

    You are getting the 200,000,000,000 bytes which is 200 "marketing" gigabytes, but when your computer allocates those 200,000,000,000 bytes, it takes more bytes to make a a gigabyte, meaning you end up with less gigabytes from all those damn bytes.

    bytes.
    bytes.
    bytes.

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      #3
      IT Industry lies.

      Just like old 17 inch CRT monitors were 15.9 inch viewable.

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        #4
        strange i'm near sure winxp recognized as a 200gb on a fresh install...i want my 14gb damn it!

        t.hanks 4 the reply guys.

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          #5
          All hard drives do it. The manufacturers and marketing materials treat a gigabyte as 1,000 kilobytes, when in reality (and in any OS) it's 1,024 kilobytes. That's why bigger hard drives have a bigger discrepancy between the advertised and actual storage.

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            #6
            Originally posted by EvilBoris View Post
            It is because a actual gigabyte in computer talk is
            1,073,741,824 bytes
            Nah, that is now a Gibibyte (GiB)

            but marketing brain people think that it is easier to think that
            1,000,000,000 bytes is a Gigabyte.
            That is a gigabyte (GB) - Giga means one billion.


            It's not really a con on the part of the HDD manufacturers as they are adhering to the proper units that were defined to solve any confusion between decimal and binary. The problem is that XP and a lot of other software still display an ambiguous unit.

            Sticks of RAM come in gibibytes and XP wrongly uses the term "GB" to describe their capacity.

            HDDs come in gigabytes and XP displays their size in gibibytes while still using the term "GB".

            Last edited by SubparMario; 23-03-2007, 18:23.

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              #7
              The missing 14GB isn't missing. It's due to the drive being formatted. The file system, boot record etc take up some of the capacity of the drive.

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                #8
                That doesn't take as much as 14Gb though. The rest of them are right, it's due to the Gigabyte/Gibibyte discrepancy.

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                  #9
                  My iMac is formatted using HFS+. The unformatted capacity of the drive is 250GB. Presumably gigabytes.
                  The formatted capacity of the drive is 232.44GB. Which I'm pretty certain is gigabytes.

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                    #10
                    Originally posted by CMcK View Post
                    My iMac is formatted using HFS+. The unformatted capacity of the drive is 250GB. Presumably gigabytes.
                    The formatted capacity of the drive is 232.44GB. Which I'm pretty certain is gigabytes.
                    Did you not read the previous posts!?!?!

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                      #11
                      That's a textbook example

                      The drive is 250 GB, which is around 232.8 GiB. Apple can't be bothered updating to use the proper unit so it's shown with the ambiguous 'GB' term.

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                        #12
                        So the actual formatted capacity of my iMac's HDD is just over 216GiB then. So that's 16GiB used up due to formatting.
                        I really must start using proper KiB, MiB and GiB stlye numbers when refering to computer stuff in the future.

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                          #13
                          No. Its all numbers, not formatting. Read post 2.

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                            #14
                            Originally posted by NekoFever View Post
                            All hard drives do it. The manufacturers and marketing materials treat a gigabyte as 1,000 kilobytes, when in reality (and in any OS) it's 1,024 kilobytes. That's why bigger hard drives have a bigger discrepancy between the advertised and actual storage.

                            a gigabyte is never 1,000 kilobytes, and never 1,024 kilobytes

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                              #15
                              OK my bad. I'm going in circles here. That's what 2 months of nightshift does to you I suppose!

                              Got the raw figures from Disk Utility:
                              250GB HDD = 250,059,350,016 Bytes = 232.9 GiB.
                              After formatting capacity is 249,581,158,400 Bytes = 232.4 GiB = 249.6 GB.

                              So that about half a GiB lost due to formatting. And the rest due to marketing.

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