WD Passport 250 gig = 232 gig when I plug it in

bruce wayne

Where the heck is the other 18 gig ??? Explorer is showing the volume on this drive as being 232 gig...I can understand some storage being taken up with the utilities and mannuals and stuff....but 18 gig ?? WTF

How can I get the 18 gig back

chin_grin

Format?

Alun

1Gigabyte in disk manufacturers terms is 1,000,000,000 bytes. Windows displays the number of what are strictly known as Gibibytes (although nobody actually uses this term in real life) or units of 1,073,741,824 bytes, so what you are seeing is 250,000,000,000/1,073,741,824 bytes or 232.83GB.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

o1s1n

Happens with all harddrives.

As Alun said, it's a difference in the definition of a gb.

Count yourself lucky, my 500gb external is in fact a mere 465gb.

bruce wayne

man....what a rip off

BaconZombie

As Alun quoted is to do with the way the manufactures list drive sizes {which they have been sued in the states over} and it's also down to the filesystem {and cluster size} you format the drive to.

Alun wrote: »

1Gigabyte in disk manufacturers terms is 1,000,000,000 bytes. Windows displays the number of what are strictly known as Gibibytes (although nobody actually uses this term in real life) or units of 1,073,741,824 bytes, so what you are seeing is 250,000,000,000/1,073,741,824 bytes or 232.83GB.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

Adam

bruce wayne wrote: »

man....what a rip off

lol, I've never heard it put that way...it's just a fact of life, with ALL hard drives, regardless of size.

Stephen

Its the way the data storage industry has operated for decades.

Jonathan

BOFH_139 wrote: »

As Alun quoted is to do with the way the manufactures list drive sizes {which they have been sued in the states over} and it's also down to the filesystem {and cluster size} you format the drive to.

I had forgotten about that xkcd


The difference is due to drive manufactures using 1000mb = 1 gb, where as operating systems use 1024mb = 1 gb

here.from.day.1

OMG ROFLcakes! wrote: »

lol, I've never heard it put that way...it's just a fact of life, with ALL hard drives, regardless of size.

Yep exactly. Any of the hard drives ive bought even always had a note on the box explaining how the size is calculated.

Overheal

simply put its a convenient loophole for hardware marketing.