Missing 7 Gig

[Affy]

Wonder if anyone can help I've just spent 3 hours trying to install a 160 gig drive (what a pain) now that it's finally in only 153.38 gig is being recognised. Any one have any ideas on were the missing 7 gig could of disappeared to.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[GOLCPL]

When you buy a 160GB drive that is Before Formatting. Like an 80GB drive comes out to 76 or 74gb when formatted this is nomral

 

[wolluf]

If you search (here or just Google), you should see the answer to this - I've posted it many times - its the definition of a gigabyte. Drive manufacturers use 1,000,000,000 byte definition - so you probably have 160,000,000,000 byte drive. Others use 1024 cubed, 1024 squared time 1000 and 1024 times 1000 squared. If you measure 160 billion bytes with these definitions you get c. 149, 153 and 156 GB

 

[rclarke250]

It started because computers use hexadecimal (base 16) as opposed to decimal (base 10) that we use everyday. Computer engineers started refering to 1024 bits as a kilo,then as you added more zero's mega,giga,tera....the disparity in size is the difference between base 10 that most people think in,and base 16,and base 8(octal) from the engineers.

 

[Affy]

Thanks for the quick response guys much appreciated.

 

[mcall]

I'm not sure I'd put the blame on computer engineers. They knew as we techs did that a kilo was 1024 bytes. The prob started during the "drive" wars in the late 80's. Marketing depts in some companies found it looked better to advertise a "bigger" hard drive by using decimal rather than HEX. For a while we had good companies (seagate for one) showing hex size while others were using decimal size. Prob got so bad PC Mag and Byte both did articles on sales tactics. Unfortunately, general consumers only saw size so even good intentioned companies bowed to pressure and started advertising by decimal. Sit still going on as noted by wolluf above.