I bought a "My Passport Essential" hard drive disk from WD the other day. I reformatted the drive to NFTS which deleted all the crap that come on it. I bought it back up my music and video files so I didn't need the software and all the junk that came with it. Before and after reformatting I noticed that the drive only has 299 GB of free space on it. The drive is advertised as having 230 GB of space.

I know that this happens with hard drives. I know that we never actually get the full capacity that drives are advertised at; however, losing 21 GB on a drive is crazy to me. Not to mention there is not a single thing on this drive. Literally, I open up this drive from My Computer and there is not one file on it yet. So where does the 21 GB of space go? Can I get it back? Is there any formatting that can be done? Is WD lying?

The drive works fine but this problem has always kind of baffled me. Any information would be much apprectiated. Thanks.

ok, im confused.
1. you have 69GB more than advertised?
2. you somehow have 21GB less at the same time?
3 either way your math is wrong.

BTW, you can always expect a 10% overhead.

is the 21 GB the data that was originally on the drive...

nevermind... your post makes no sense... please edit or post again

He probably means it's a 320 Gig drive, and after formatting he's seeing 299, which of course is as expected.

Jeez, sorry. I meant that it was advertised as having 320 GB like BustedSony pointed out.

^ thats what I thought originally... but... IDK... his post seems highly stupid...

lets just say they did lie to you... (decieve is better because they didn't really lie.....anyway) it wouldn't matter... you still have tons of space... the drive works fine... so I don't see the issue...

a better way of putting it is... Whats the point of this thread?

+1

Drive manufacturers: 1000MB = 1GB

Windows: 1024MB = 1GB

Do the math (or a google search)

I thought everyone had figured this out a long time ago...

320,000,000 / 1.024 = 312,500,000 actual bits on the disks. 320GB is the decimal number, but computers are binary, so the actual number is a bit less. It is from the 312GB number that you then need to take formatting into account. No body is ripping you off, its the difference between advertised numbers from people who went to school learning to sell things, and the usable number actually found on the disk.

My 250GB was formatted as ~232GB usable, and my 320GB was ~298GB. Don't worry about it, your fine.

The point of the thread is to understand what happens to 21 GBs of a 320 GB drive. I'm not terribly upset about the drive's performance - like you said thogrom, it works. I simply was hoping some one would tell me why that happens.

The 1000gb vs 1024gb version would only account for an approximate 3% decrease in usable drive space.

1000/1024 = .977 -----> 320*.977 = 312.6

It's just one of those confusing marketing tactics that manufacturers come up with all the time. Another similar example is when AMD started advertising their Athlon XP processors as "2800+" or "3200+", meaning they were supposedly faster than Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz and 3.2 Ghz respectively. Whether those chips were really equivalent/faster to their counterpart Pentium 4 chips or not, the fact was that they were not actually 2.8 Ghz or 3.2 Ghz. Their actual speeds were 2.08 Ghz and 2.17 Ghz, which would make them sound much slower to the average, uninformed consumer. So, AMD came up with their deceptive (although not entirely untrue), but effecitve marketing campaign to advertise their chips. There are literally tons of examples like this. So, whenever you see advertisements, you should take it with a grain of salt and do your homework to really understand what's going on - even when they deal with what should be straight up facts like numbers.

Forget my last post. Thanks 4745454b

Nope.

You aren't going far enough. Not only is 1GB = 1024MB according to windows, but 1 MB = 1024KB, and 1 KB = 1024B.

To drive makers, 1GB = 1000MB, 1MB = 1000KB, and 1KB = 1000B.

Windows uses binary, drive manufacturers use decimal.

1 decimal KB = 0.9766 binary KB (1000/1024)
1 decimal MB = 0.9537 binary MB (1000^2/1024^2)
1 decimal GB = 0.9313 binary GB (1000^3/1024^3)
1 decimal TB = 0.9095 binary TB (1000^4/1024^4)

Based on this, 320 decimal GB = 320*0.9313 binary GB = 298.023 GB. In other words, your drive has a true decimal 320GB of storage. Formatting isn't taking any significant chunk.

Yeah, hard drive manufacturers tend to use 1,000 instead of 1,024 for 1KB.

You also need to be aware that the file structure itself (NTFS, Fat 32, Fat 16, whatever for MACs) takes up some space as well.