I just started the install of my new computer system. I save 50GB of data that I will port over to the new computer once it is installed. Some of it I will burn onto DVDs. I am splitting the 200 GB hard drive in to several partitions. I installed the hard drive as master and started the computer with windows XP Pro disk. It started the install and asked to press F8. Which I did, and then it asked to pick a partition. I want to setup 40GB for the system files only. It said there are only 190,000 MB available on the hard drive. There are exactly 200 billion bytes on the hard drive.
http://compreviews.about.com/od/storage/a/ActualHDSizes.htm
1 comment:
Michael, thank you for posting a link to the article about actual vs. advertised hard drive sizes.
Way back in 1998 I encountered this problem for the first time with a 2GB drive. It should have been 2,147,483,648 bytes. But it was only 2,000,000,000 bytes. That's 140.6 megabytes missing, which was a serious discrepancy at the time. I called the manufacturer, and actually got them to replace the drive with a 4.5 GB drive instead (their next size up).
I notice on their labeling now, in the fine print, they have a note about the sizes being reported based on number of millions of bytes instead of gigabytes, so no one else can get away with what I did :-)
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