Is 74.5Gb normal for WD8000JB 80gig - or has bad sectors?

[charles555]

Thanks for coming into the G-zone, where all Gz are up, including you. So - I bought this drive used from someone on this forum.

It says 74.5Gb, but 80 billion bytes. Is this right. I am not complaining, just paranoid because I have an IBM DTLA as my other drive, look up the whole class suite story...

When I got it I immediately ran a surface scan in XP to check for bad sectors, and then re-formatted it with regular cluster size (4Kb), if that makes a difference.

Thanks in Advance to all of you

 

[Holy Roman Empire]

Sounds about right to me. My 2 "160gig" drives only net me a total of just over 300gigs combined. Thats just about the same rate of loss to the marketing department as you're suffering.

 

[pr0zac]

Yeah thats definately cool. Harddrives always read lower than their "rated" capacity. My "74gig" raptor reads at 69gigs.

-zac

 

[defakto]

Charles55, what you're seeing is marketing using peoples lack of knowledge to sell things. Basically they market the drives size based on 1000 bit to a kilobyte, 1000 kilobyte to a megabyte, 1000 megabyte to a gigabyte. So you're thinking an 80 gig drive should be 80,000,000,000 bytes, when in reality it should be 85,899,345,920, a difference around 5 gigs. They started this way back when because the size difference was about 5-10 megs or less, depending on the size drive. Now, you can get sizes that are over 10 gigs of lost space due to marketing.