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    Hard Drive Question

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by Gunner, Sep 11, 2007.

  1. Gunner

    Gunner Notebook Evangelist

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    When I purchased my laptop, I opted for the 160 GB hard drive. But the hard drive is telling me it's total max capacity is 136 GB. I know the recovery only uses 10 GB, but that's still a shortage of 14 GB. Are these GB's being used for something else not noted on the computer, or what? I'm not exactly a computer guru, so don't call me a noob if it's something obvious.
     
    Gunner, Sep 11, 2007
    #1
  2. Lithus

    Lithus NBR Janitor

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    160 GB = actually 149 real GB.
    149 GB - 10 GB = 139 GB
    139 GB - bunch of crap/shadow files = 136 GB
    Yep, the math adds up.
     
    Lithus, Sep 11, 2007
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  3. Xelloss

    Xelloss Notebook Consultant

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    Its all there just with formatting, and Dell uses some other GBs for recovery and some other partitions, check out the Admin Manager to see where all your GBS are.
     
    Xelloss, Sep 11, 2007
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  4. Greg

    Greg Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    The real story is not 'formating.' It is the simple fact that a computer calculates space on the following numbers.

    1KB = 1024B
    1MB = 1024KB
    1GB = 1024KB

    But hard disk vendors use the following system:

    1KB = 1000B
    1MB = 1000KB
    1GB = 1000GB

    So, you do have at least 160,000,000,000 bytes available on your hard drive...but the PC considers it to be ~149GB because of the above math I mentioned.
     
    Greg, Sep 11, 2007
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  5. Gunner

    Gunner Notebook Evangelist

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    Alright, that makes sense, thanks.
     
    Gunner, Sep 11, 2007
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