OK, first off, this is **not **the 137 GB Windows limit issue. My bios isn’t very old either, but I am looking for an update while this posts.
I installed a 160 GB hard drive, but windows shows considerably less space available on that drive.
I know to expect some space to be “lost” because of the way manufacturers represent disk space in their marketing (the 1000 MB Gig).
My question is, how much of a difference should I expect between a drive advertised as being 160GB, and the actual available space (when used as secondary storage -no o/s.)?
The problem arises in decimal vs. binary notation. They like to say there is 160 GB, and to them, 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes (10^9.) In actuality, a GB is 2^30 power, or 1,073,741,824 bytes.
If we divide 1610^9 by 162^30, we get 0.93, a 7% loss of space. So in reality you have about 149 GB.
Oh, not to hijack this too much, but my IBM hard drive shows up as 123 GB. Can someone expplain this? (And it was marketed as a 120 GB hard drive, which would make me think there was 111 GB, but somehow I got 3 more.) And it’s not jsut 120*2^30 either, because that nets me with 128 GB.
As my father is fond of saying, “some people would bitch if you hanged them with a new rope.” Criminy, you get an extra 3x2^28 bytes for free. I remember when we struggled to have enough kilobytes Yeah, yeah, I realize you were not complaining I just had to go in old coot mode for a minute there.
I think IBM just took the more ethical route used the number of true gigabytes then rounded it[down] to the nearest round number rather than calling 10^9 a gigabyte in labelling their drive.
Yeah, yeah, I realize you were not complaining I just had to go in old coot mode for a minute there.