New Drive Format Loses 14GB

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Carlosinfl

Loves the juice
Joined
Sep 25, 2002
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I just got a new Seagate ST920042 S-ATA laptop drive and formatted this as FAT32 for my external drive enclose and noticed rather than 200GB's I only get 186.3GB of free space. I was wondering if having a 13.7GB data loss is normal?
 
yup, perfectly normal

A MB is comprised of 1024KB, not 1000KB like hard drive manufacturers use
 
did you forget that windows measures in base 2 and hard drive manufacturers measure in base 10?

the conversion between the 2 numbering systems when it comes to your hard drive is 200 times 0.931 which equals 186.2
 
I don't use Windows so I don't know what it measures but thanks for all the info guys!
 
Carloswill said:
I don't use Windows so I don't know what it measures but thanks for all the info guys!
Click to expand...

All computers use base two, since the only numbers they can read are 1's and zeros.

Its just something that has always happened with hard drives, and always will happen.

I remember when I got my first computer. It was advertised as a 2 gig hard drive. It was huge for the time, but I was disapointed that I only had 1.8 gigs or something like that.
 
You should be able to read the capacity of the HDD as a number of bytes (not GB). For instance my 150 GB Raptor X is registered as 139 "GB" (really GiB), but Windows also writes 150 037 590 016 bytes.

If I remember correctly the Linux kernel developers decided to switch to the correct prefixes several years ago, so it would seem likely that most Linux distributions also use KiB, MiB, GiB for base 2 sizes. But since I'm not a Linux user I don't know.
 
TMan1876 said:
Could we get a sticky on this? It seems to come up alot.
Click to expand...

That would require people to read the stickies before they post. Do you realize how many times the why does my HDD format at 137GB post comes? There is a sticky for that.
 
No - there is no sticky and I attempted to search and ruffle through the posts that came up...

And people DO read the stickies, at least I do...
 
screw a stickie, how about spending 18 seconds on google
 
Verge said:
screw a stickie, how about spending 18 seconds on google
Click to expand...

that still doesn't help the numerous people that think a WD GP is variable RPM :rolleyes:

we won't get a sticky on this just like we won't on the WD GP drives
 
If you go back long enough you can find HDs that were sized in binary by engineers and then had decimal lies attached to them by marketing instead of marketing picking the round lies to spec the drives at.

I had a 4.3(4.004) GB WD drive in the k6-350 I got in 1999. IIRC after subtracting fat overhead the 540(514)MB drive in my 486 had just a hair over 500MB of usable capacity.
 
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