External hard drive question

vulcan57

I have just bought a Seagate 1.5 Tb external hard drive and in general happy enough with it. I took it out of the box, plugged it in and hey presto 1.36 TB, WHAT!!! All that was on it was 3 files, like set up etc. adding up to a few kb. That means that there is 130 Gb of storage that I have paid for that I'm not getting, a lot more than there is on my computer. Now, is that false advertising? Is there a reason that that is all the storage there is? and if so why don't they give the actual storage size when advertising these things?

Tea_Bag

if you look at the box, it'll say 1.5TB*

and then somewhere unreadable it'll say

*upto 1.5TB. some space is used for system data and not accessible.

vulcan57

Tea_Bag wrote: »

if you look at the box, it'll say 1.5TB*

and then somewhere unreadable it'll say

*upto 1.5TB. some space is used for system data and not accessible.

140Gb for system data??

Overheal

The manufacturers of these things (who - trust me - know much better) use the Decimal Notation to notarise how much storage their devices have. Regardless, the Computer operates in Binary. see the chart for details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte

So theres some of your space gone.

Then you are of course talking about an unformatted drive, when they test these storage figures. NTFS, what your drive is formatted to out of the box, is full of functionality which requires use of that space. For example, the Volume Shadow copy Service. This service - which you would not want to live without, frankly - is going to be responsible for most if not all of that 140gb of missing space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_Shadow_Copy

Its part deceptive salesmanship, part technical limitation. For what its worth though, your Hard Drive has 1.5 Terabytes by the industry standard.

wolfric

Try looking at this to see if it answers your question

NotMe

What Overheal said. Technically kilo means 1000 and mega means 1000000 and thats the way the harddrive manufacturers measure it. 1 TB = 1000 GB. 1 GB = 1000 MB. etc. On computers though 1 TB = 1024 GB, 1 GB = 1024 MB etc and that's the way windows shows it.

So your 1.5TB drive * 1000 = 1 500 GB * 1000 = 1 500 000 MB *1000 = 1 500 000 000 KB *1000 = 1 500 000 000 000 B

and in windows where 1024 B = 1 MB:
1 500 000 000 000 B / 1024 = 1 464 843 750 KB / 1024 = 1 430 511 MB / 1024 = 1397 GB / 1024 = 1.36 TB

Webmonkey

1.5TB in their terms is 1500GB = 1500 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = 1500000000000 bytes.
Now in real terms, this is 1500000000000 bytes / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 1.36TB

Edit: Damn you not me, getting there before me

Overheal

NotMe wrote: »

What Overheal said. Technically kilo means 1000 and mega means 1000000 and thats the way the harddrive manufacturers measure it. 1 TB = 1000 GB. 1 GB = 1000 MB. etc. On computers though 1 TB = 1024 GB, 1 GB = 1024 MB etc and that's the way windows shows it.

So your 1.5TB drive * 1000 = 1 500 GB * 1000 = 1 500 000 MB *1000 = 1 500 000 000 KB *1000 = 1 500 000 000 000 B

and in windows where 1024 B = 1 MB:
1 500 000 000 000 B / 1024 = 1 464 843 750 KB / 1024 = 1 430 511 MB / 1024 = 1397 GB / 1024 = 1.36 TB

Ah yes. The math I was thinking about but couldnt do without coffee this morning. gratsi

vulcan57

All explained. Many thanks to all. Like I said I am happy enough with what I have and it will do me for a number of years yet.