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    Shortchanged on hard drive storage on my Studio 1537

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by Cq493p, Jan 23, 2009.

  1. Cq493p

    Cq493p Newbie

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    Maybe I'm missing something.

    I ordered a Dell 1537 laptop with a 320GB hard drive.

    The laptop arrived yesterday, and I checked its hard drive's size, which showed 288GB, of which 269 is free.

    it does have a "recovery" drive, which houses 10GB. But even with this drive, the total doesn't add up to 320.

    Am I missing something? Or did Dell shortchange me?
     
    Cq493p, Jan 23, 2009
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  2. ry6uf

    ry6uf Notebook Enthusiast

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    Usually you get a 298GB on a 320Gb hard disk after formatting. The remaining space is allocated for the file table/system information.
    Also the units Gb vs GB accounts for the difference, because the space is calculated dfferently by the HDD manufacturers vs the operating system

    ---
     
    ry6uf, Jan 23, 2009
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  3. idq000

    idq000 Notebook Deity

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    Basically, when they say 320 GB they mean, 320,000,000,000 bytes...

    When in reality, 320 GB is actually 343,597,383,680 bytes.

    So if you convert 320,000,000,000 bytes into gigabytes, using the actual 1024 bytes per KB, 1024 KB per MB and 1024 MB per GB, you get 298.02 GB.

    Therefore, it seems perfectly reasonable. The 10 GB is automatically subtracted because you have a recovery partition. So now you have 288 GB. I'd say the rest is Windows Vista and all the junk they install on your computer before they ship it out.
     
    idq000, Jan 23, 2009
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  4. Cq493p

    Cq493p Newbie

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    Ok. Thanks for the answers, guys!

    I admit ignorance about the more technical aspects of computers, so thanks for clearing this up for me.
     
    Cq493p, Jan 23, 2009
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