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[gyrene2083]

Why is it that one purchases a Hard-drive. They never get the entire hardrive to use.  For example, my mom purchased a 160 gig hard drive and only 130 gig shows up.  

Why are do hard drives say they are one thing but, the OS states another?

[DermicSavage]

technically they round up the number on hard drives, so a 160 is more like 156 gigs...

but also when you format a hard drive, it uses up some space, and i would also suggets you check to see that there is only one partition using that entire drive

[shavedrat]

A meg on a hard drive is 1000kb, but a meg in a windows environment is 1024kb, so when you list that hard drive under windows, you may have 80 000 000kb, but it will list as less.

Heres an example
8000 / 1000 = 8
8000 / 1024 = 7.8

both drives are the same size, windows just tells u its "smaller"


If this isnt what you meant by the drive being an incorrect size then uh.. i have no idea

[lebriznon]

often when you buy say, a 120GB hard drive, they give you a "120 billion byte hard drive"

but since 1 kB=1024 bytes
1MB=1024 kB
1GB=1024MB,

120 000 000 000 bytes / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 112 real Gigabytes.

this stupid misleading label is just a marketing scam i think.

[gyrene2083]

Thank you all for your responses, I greatly appreciate it....