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Hard Drive Space.

post #1 of 4
4/17/03 at 1:46pm
Thread Starter 
I was wondering why when it comes to memory they overestimate on memory space. For instance I bought a 5670 Sager with 60 GB HDD, and my computer only reads 55.7 GB.

That is like 4.3 GB that are missing. My first IBM thinkpad didn't even have that much Hard Drive space.

Can someone explain why this is please?
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post #2 of 4
4/17/03 at 2:24pm
First of all, you need to distinguish MEMORY (as in RAM) from STORAGE (as in Hard Drive)...

Oh this is a long-standing issue in the computer industry.

It really started cropping up with MAXTOR and their 1,000,000 bytes = 1 megabyte crap.

Sure, in a BASE-10 number system, Maxtor is correct, however computers are BASE-16* (0-F, aka hexadecimal) and hence, 1 megabyte should be 1,000,000 bytes in a base-16 system (which would be 1024*1024 = 1,048,576) but by using base-10 (1000 * 1000 = 1mil) we only get (roughly) 95% of a base-16 MEGA...

THEN, add to all that the overhead that the drive needs AND the overhead that the FILESYSTEM needs, and you quickly do not have as much space on your HD as you were led to believe.

-myrkat


*technical note: computers are actually only BINARY (0 & 1) but for the purpose of this discussion, we'll speak of HEXADECIMAL...
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post #3 of 4
4/17/03 at 2:27pm
Also, WindowsXP/NTFS always wants to leave 8MB alone... haven't really figured out WHY one cannot use ALL of the drive that is available, then just see 8MB less (if it really needs that much for overhead); rather, it is puzzling that there is an unpartitioned/unformatted space left...

maybe it's MS's sneaky way of allowing themselves a portion of your HD w/o your knowing... maybe TurboTax tried using this and screwed up all those dual-boot systems...

Oh, theories abound!
-myrkat

[EDIT] I did mean 8MB (megabytes) not 8GB... thx...
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post #4 of 4
4/17/03 at 2:55pm

8GB?

are you sure you don't mean 8 "MB"?
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